The Colorado Energy Profile uses Xapian, an open source probabilistic information retrieval library, to power its search engine. The Xapian search syntax is designed to be similar to other web based search engines. A description of the permissible syntax is provided below.

Operators

AND

expression AND expression matches documents which are matched by both of the subexpressions.

OR

expression OR expression matches documents which are matched by either of the subexpressions.

NOT

expression NOT expression matches documents which are matched by only the first subexpression. This can also be written as expression AND NOT expression. If FLAG_PURE_NOT is enabled, then

NOT expression will match documents which don't match the subexpression.

XOR

expression XOR expression matches documents which are matched by one or other of the subexpressions, but not both. XOR is probably a bit esoteric.

Bracketed expressions

You can control the precedence of the boolean operators using brackets. In the query one OR two AND three the AND takes precedence, so this is the same as one OR (two AND three). You can override the precedence using (one OR two) AND three.

+ and -

A group of terms with some marked with + and - will match documents containing all of the + terms, but none of the - terms. Terms not marked with + or - contribute towards the document rankings. You can also use + and - on phrases and on bracketed expressions.

NEAR

one NEAR two NEAR three matches documents containing those words within 10 words of each other. You can set the threshold to n by using NEAR/n like so: one NEAR/6 two.

ADJ

ADJ is like NEAR but only matches if the words appear in the same order as in the query. So one ADJ two ADJ three matches documents containing those three words in that order and within 10 words of each other. You can set the threshold to n by using ADJ/n like so: one ADJ/6 two.

Phrase searches

A phrase surrounded with double quotes ("") matches documents containing that exact phrase. Hyphenated words are also treated as phrases, as are cases such as filenames and email addresses (e.g. /etc/passwd or president@whitehouse.gov).

Searching for proper names

If a query term is entered with a capitalised first letter, then it will be searched for unstemmed.