Search Tips for Webglimpse

Webglimpse supports boolean queries and wildcards, and some limited regular expressions. Words separated by spaces are treated as a phrase.

Use semi-colon (;) between words for AND. Use comma (,) for OR. Use tilde (~) for NOT. Use parentheses for grouping. Use # (pound) for wildcard matching.

Example boolean queries:

(semicolon) match documents containing the words "tree" AND "leaf" anywhere in the document

(comma) match documents containing the phrase "open source" OR the word "shareware"

(tilde) match documents containing the words "tree" and "leaf" but NOT the word "binary"

Example use of wildcard #:

match 'language' and 'languages' but not 'slang' or 'clangs'. This is different than checking the 'partial match' box in the query form, which would match all three patterns.

match all patterns above: 'languages', 'language', 'slang' and 'clangs'. This has the same effect as checking the 'partial match' box, but checking the box would be faster.

match patterns like www.anything.com

There's more...

The above examples cover the most common types of queries. Webglimpse (and glimpse) also can accept a limited form of regular expressions, including support for the '|', '*', '[]' characters and parentheses. Please see the Glimpse man page Patterns section for all the gory details. You will need to know that Webglimpse calls glimpse with the switches -U -W -j -y -z , plus others determined by the checkboxes on the form. View the source of the results page for the exact call to glimpse made by a particular webglimpse query.

Note: The above document is for the commercial/contributors version of Webglimpse. EDU and demo versions that do not have the translator module have to use the original ',' for OR, ';' for AND, and '~' for NOT

Docs and Howtos

	(semicolon) match documents containing the words "tree" AND "leaf" anywhere in the document
	(comma) match documents containing the phrase "open source" OR the word "shareware"
	(tilde) match documents containing the words "tree" and "leaf" but NOT the word "binary"

	match 'language' and 'languages' but not 'slang' or 'clangs'. This is different than checking the 'partial match' box in the query form, which would match all three patterns.
	match all patterns above: 'languages', 'language', 'slang' and 'clangs'. This has the same effect as checking the 'partial match' box, but checking the box would be faster.
	match patterns like www.anything.com