FtFind - Search For Texts

To search for texts, enter the search phrase in the box at the very top of the screen and then hit the [Search] button or press key F5. The matching texts are searched in the database and will be presented in the list below (see "Handle Search Results" for more details). 

Search Phrases

FtFind does nothing special with the search phrase entered and just forwards it "as is" to MySQL. All details on possible search phrases are therefore documented in MySQL's help file, that is stored in the \Docs sub-directory of your MySQL directory. The relevant section is "13.6.1 Boolean Full-Text Searches".

Here's the relevant part of this chapter:

The boolean full-text search capability supports the following operators:

+

A leading plus sign indicates that this word must be present in every row returned.

-

A leading minus sign indicates that this word must not be present in any row returned.

(no operator)

By default (when neither + nor - is specified) the word is optional, but the rows that contain it will be rated higher. This mimics the behavior of MATCH() ... AGAINST() without the IN BOOLEAN MODE modifier.

> <

These two operators are used to change a word's contribution to the relevance value that is assigned to a row. The > operator increases the contribution and the < operator decreases it. See the example below.

( )

Parentheses are used to group words into subexpressions. Parenthesized groups can be nested.

~

A leading tilde acts as a negation operator, causing the word's contribution to the row relevance to be negative. It's useful for marking noise words. A row that contains such a word will be rated lower than others, but will not be excluded altogether, as it would be with the - operator.

*

An asterisk is the truncation operator. Unlike the other operators, it should be appended to the word, not prepended.

"

A phrase that is enclosed within double quote (`"') characters matches only rows that contain the phrase literally, as it was typed.

The following examples demonstrate some search strings that use boolean full-text operators:

'apple banana'

Find rows that contain at least one of the two words.

'+apple +juice'

Find rows that contain both words.

'+apple macintosh'

Find rows that contain the word ``apple'', but rank rows higher if they also contain ``macintosh''.

'+apple -macintosh'

Find rows that contain the word ``apple'' but not ``macintosh''.

'+apple +(>turnover <strudel)'

Find rows that contain the words ``apple'' and ``turnover'', or ``apple'' and ``strudel'' (in any order), but rank ``apple turnover'' higher than ``apple strudel''.

'apple*'

Find rows that contain words such as ``apple'', ``apples'', ``applesauce'', or ``applet''.

'"some words"'

Find rows that contain the exact phrase ``some words'' (for example, rows that contain ``some words of wisdom'' but not ``some noise words''). Note that the `"' characters that surround the phrase are operator characters that delimit the phrase. They are not the quotes that surround the search string itself.

Unexpected results

• Words of up to 3 charactes are not indexed by default in MySQL, so you will get no results when searching for such short words. This behaviour can be changed by appropriate MySQL settings, but FtFind can't change this setting yet.
   

• You might get no results or results not containing a search word, if a word is contained in more than 50% of all texts, as MySQL treats such words as "irrelevant" for a search.
  Be aware that these 50% are easily reached while the database only contains a small number of texts!
  
  TODO/CHECK: Doc. says that "Boolean full-text searches ... do not use the 50% threshold", so this issue might not be relevant for FtFind.