Input: changed query syntax across the site

, Will Kahn-Greene | share this (mastodon)
Note: This is an old post in a blog with a lot of posts over a long span of time. The world has changed, technologies have changed, and I've changed. It's likely this is out of date, the code doesn't work, the ideas haven't aged well, or the ideas were terrible to begin with. Let me know if you think this is something that needs updating.

Better search syntax is here!

Yesterday I landed the changes for bug 986589 which affects all the search boxes and search feeds on Input. Now they use the Elasticsearch simple-query-search query instead of the hand-rolled query parser I wrote.

This was only made possible in the last month after we were updated from Elasticsearch 0.20.6 (or whatever it was) to 0.90.10.

Tell me more about this ... syntax.

I'm pretty psyched! It's pretty much the minimum required syntax for useful searching. It's kind of silly it took a year to get to this point, but so it goes.

To quote the Elasticsearch 0.90 documentation:

+  signifies AND operation
|  signifies OR operation
-  negates a single token
"  wraps a number of tokens to signify a phrase for searching
*  at the end of a term signifies a prefix query
( and )  signify precedence

Negation and prefix were the two operators my hand-rolled query parser didn't have.

What does this mean for you?

It means that you need to use the new syntax for searches on the dashboard and other parts of the site.

Further, this affects feeds, so if you're using the Atom feed, you'll probably need to update the search query there, too.

Also, we added a ? next to search boxes which links to a wiki page that documents the syntax with examples. It's a wiki page, so if the documentation is subpar or it's missing examples, feel free to let me know or fix it yourself.

Want to comment? Send an email to willkg at bluesock dot org. Include the url for the blog entry in your comment so I have some context as to what you're talking about.