Returns a list of pages with context for each hit.
Search political notes from March 2003 to the present. Returns a list of individual notes in their entirety.
Syntax for pol note search is syntax for SQLite's full text search engine.
Individual terms containing only one non-whitespace character will be silently rejected.
Normal Search (All pages)
The normal search does a literal match for one or more terms. For example,
whiskey xray
will find pages with "whiskey" and/or "xray" in them. If you quote several words ("whiskey xray"), they will be searched for together as a phrase. So
uniform "kilo bravo"
will find pages with "uniform" and/or "kilo bravo" in them. The results are ranked by the number of hits, but pages which contain ALL terms are favored. So if you search for
Bob Doug
a page which contains "bob" twice and "doug" once will rank higher than a page containing "bob" a hundred times but no doug.
The political notes search ranks only by the number of terms hit, and not by the number of total hits.
Regular Expression (All pages)
These are PCRE's ("Perl Compatible Regular Expressions") For example:
\bAmerica\b
will match "America" as a discrete word -- it will NOT match "Americana" or "Americanism".
You will be warned if your regexp is invalid. Using stuff like .*, even in the non-greedy form .*?, may not be very useful. If you want to look for one thing or another indefinitely seperated, it's better to use multiple terms.
MULTIPLE TERMS: The regular expression search does this the same way as the normal search, except `backticks` are used to indicate whole phrases instead of double quotes. So:
\buniform\b `(kilo|foo bar) bravo` whales?
Will find pages with the regular expressions "\buniform\b", "(kilo|foo bar) bravo", and/or "whales?" in them. The "?" here is a regexp quantifier, so this term will match "whale" or "whales". If you want to literally search for something with a question mark in it, use, e.g., "whales\?".
Pages are ranked the same way they are for the normal search.
Please send questions, bug reports, etc. about the site-search to: rms at gnu dot org
Complete source code for the search engine is available here.