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Jay
Asked: 2014-11-20 05:50:30 +0800 CST

Effective ways to search in recoll

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I have been using recoll for awhile. And I absolutely love it. I have it indexed all my journals, ebooks, pictures, videos and also a wild bunch of pdf's from all over the internet. Topics spanning from movie reviews to computer algorithms and mediterranean recipes. Infact, for me recoll has kind of replaced google in the sense that .. I search my local instance of recoll first and only when I don't get anything relevant, I open up google in a new tab and start searching..

The only problem is .. I'm still not sure how well to search using recoll. I went through the documentation and it is a bit confusing. I mean it supports a rich query syntax and all.

So I was wondering if anyone has any idea of how to effectively search using recoll? What modifiers can I use and such? And what exactly do all those modifiers mean? There is 'l', 'p', 'o' and a few others. Some of these modifiers support appending numbers to them like 'o10' for instance. The documentation is not very clear about what exactly that means. Sometimes, it seems like turning off 'stemming' gives me better results. But I'm not exactly sure.

Could someone more enlightened, enlighten me? Thanks

recoll

1 Answers

  1. I suppose that you did have a look at this manual section and that it was not clear enough ? http://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/usermanual/usermanual.html#RCL.SEARCH.LANG.MODIFIERS

    Stemming is the operation which turns a derived term like "floors", "flooring" into a base one (the stem): floor. This means that searching for "floors" will also find texts which only contain "floor". Sometimes, this is undesirable, so Recoll lets you turn it off either by capitalizing the term ("Floors"), or by using the 'l' modifier.

    Normally, a double quoted input to Recoll tells it to look for the input terms in the order given, without any intermediate terms. Searching for "first second" (actually double quoted in the entry) will not find texts only containing [second first] or [first a second]

    A double-quoted entry can be turned into a "proximity search" by adding a 'p' modifier. "first second"p will find texts containing [first second] but also ones containing [second first], but not any only containing [first a second] or [second a first].

    The o modifier lets you specify that some intervening terms may appear. For example "first second"o1 will match both [first second] and [first a second]

    For most queries, you don't need this stuff at all, but sometimes, they can make the difference between finding hundred of uninteresting results and finding just the one you want.

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