Panoptic: Query Language Help

Please read the explanation of how simple queries are processed and the description of how Panoptic presents its results before reading this page.

Many features of the Panoptic query language are intended to be accessed via GUI features on "advanced search" pages or on customised search interfaces developed for individual organisations. However, if you are not phased by the terseness of the query language you can use any of the operators described here via the "simple" Panoptic search interface.

This page gives a simple example of the use of each of the basic query language operators. Other pages describe metadata search and present more complex query examples.

Query Language Operators

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Example Query	Explanation	Illustrative results for this search
solar cell efficiency	Simple query. Described in the simple search document.	show results
"May 19"	Phrase operator. Using the phrase operator can reduce spurious results by requiring that the component words appear consecutively and in the order specified. Note that intervening punctuation, HTML tags etc are ignored.	show results
t:solar	Metadata search This query attempts to locate documents containing the word solar within metadata fields corresponding to the metadata class t (ie. document title.)	show results
[nuclear atomic] reactor	Dysjunction operator. A full answer to this query will include the word reactor and one or more of nuclear or atomic. The square brackets achieve a similar effect to the OR operator in a Boolean language.	show results
Kennett !Jeff	Negation operator. A full answer to this query will include the word Kennett but no occurrence of the word Jeff. Unlike the mandatory exclusion operator (see below), (partial) results presented in subsequent tiers may contain the word Jeff.	show results
Kennett -Jeff	Mandatory exclusion operator. A full answer to this query will include the word Kennett but no occurrence of the word Jeff. Unlike the negation operator (see above), no results will contain the word Jeff in the indexable part of the text. The partial results are those which satisfy the mandatory constraint (no Jeff) but which do not contain Kennett. This is similar to the NOT operator in a Boolean language.	show results
Kennett +Jeff	Mandatory inclusion operator. A full answer to this query will include the words Kennett and Jeff. Every result will contain the word Jeff.	show results
`George Bush`	Near (proximity) operator. The near operator (backquotes) requires that the component words appear, in any order, within 15 words of each other. The example shown will match "George Dubya Bush" and "Bush, George"	Scheduled for Panoptic version 4.1.3
econ*	Truncation operator. This example pattern matches all words starting with econ, such as economomy and economical. Be careful, there are almost always more matching words than you expect.	show results
*fat*	Truncation operator. This example pattern matches all words containing the string fat, such as fat and grandfather. The truncation operator can appear at the left, at the right or both, but NOT in the middle of the string.	show results
d<20sep2003 d>13jan2001<20sep2003 d>feb2001<oct2003	Date Query. Date queries constrain the result set to documents that were modified/created during a specified time period. For date querying purposes, Panoptic only records one date per document. It will look for the date modified, the date created and the HTTP server's last modified date (in that order). The d<20sep2003 query returns documents that were modified/created before the 20th of September 2003.

The example result pages linked to from the above table were saved on 26 July 2001 from a variety of Panoptic search services. The pages have been edited to remove extraneous material such as headers, footers and logos.