Search Discussion Forums

Use this tool to search the Discussion Forums using keyword or boolean search queries.


Username Date (yyyy-mm-dd)

Enter Franklin OR Melville or Franklin AND Georgia for boolean search examples.
Enter "American Literature" in quotes for an exact match.


About this Search

This search engine provides access to the full array of Boolean fulltext searching available in MySQL. For compound searches, a Boolean "AND" can be queried by placing the term "AND" between terms. A Boolean "OR" query can be structured similarly by placing "OR" between terms. The form accepts up to six unique terms using these systems. For more complex queries, MySQL's Boolean modifiers can be used as below.

The default search is a word search: each word of your query is searched independently. By placing quotes ("") around your search phrase, you can search by exact phrase.


MySQL's Boolean Operators

These definitions are modified from the MySQL 5.0 manual pages on fulltext boolean searching.

+ (plus)
Indicates that a term is REQUIRED to be present in each returned row.
- (minus)
Indicates that the term must NOT be present in each row returned. Only acts to exclude rows which are matched by other search terms. Used by itself, the minus operator will return an empty set.
(no operator)
If no operator is specified, the term is optional. Its presence, however, will give that row a higher relevancy in the search results.
< (less than) and > (greater than)
Used to increase or decrease the relevancy ranking of a term. > increases the value of that term and < decreases that value.
( ) (parentheses)
Parentheses are used to group subexpressions, and can be nested.
~ (tilde)
Similar to the minus operator, the tilde causes the presence of a term to decrease the relevancy of a returned row, but does not exclude that row from the results.
* (asterisk)
The asterisk is a wildcard operator - it must be appended to a word, instead of preceding it, and will match any term which begins with that sequence of characters.
" " (quotation characters)
Quotations will require the enclosed phrase to be matched exactly as typed. Prior to MySQL 5.03, word characters and non-word characters were matched exactly. As of MySQL 5.03 and later, non-word characters no longer need to match exactly. Example: "test phrase" can now return "test,phrase".

Note: this search engine can be configured to search email addresses as well.


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