EzTorrent:How to Use the Search Engine

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1. All special characters are ignored except for spaces in phrases/substrings.

2. Upper/lower case doesn't matter.

3. All words/substrings without a + or - in front of the word/substring are ORed together.

4. Fulltext searches search for words or phrases consisting of complete words. A word is a blank delimited string without special characters. Substring searches search for substrings. A substring may be a word, part of a word, or part of a phrase consisting of substrings and/or words.

5. Fulltext searches use a special index and, thus, are much faster than substring searches and use a hell lesser resources. You should always use a fulltext search first and only use a substring search if the fulltext search doesn't return any useful result.

6. Fulltext searches are limited by so called stopwords. Stopwords are filler words like the, a, who, where, do, and many, many more. Stopwords in fulltext searches are ignored. If you want a good result or any at all for searches consisting only of stopwords, you'll have to use a substring search.

7. Fulltext operators.

Preliminary note: Words or phrases without any operator are considered as optional, which is why such operator-less searches return an ORed result.

a. There are several operators which you just can ignore. Those are the operators which influence the relevance (score) of a search hit. As our search engine doesn't sort the hits by their search relevance but upload date by default, those operators are mentioned in the search page for completeness only. The operators are: ~<>

b. Phrase operator ". If you want to search for a phrase consisting of two or more complete words you must enclose this phrase in quotation marks. Example: You want to find all torrents in which Pearl Jam is mentioned either in torrent title (name), filename of the .torrent, or description text. Your search should be: "pearl jam"

c. Must have operator +. If you want to search for a word or phrase but want only those torrents in which another word/phrase is also present, use the plus sign in front of the word. Example: You want to search for all Otis Redding on torrents in which Carla Thomas is also mentioned. Your search should be: +"otis redding" +"carla thomas"

(Note: If your search were "otis redding" +"carla thomas", you would actually search for Carla Thomas torrents in which Otis Redding may appear or may not. See preliminary note.)

d. Must not have operator -. The contrary of the must have operator. Example: You want to search for all Otis Redding torrents in which Carla Thomas is not mentioned. Your search should be: +"otis redding" -"carla thomas"

e. Truncation operator *. Please note the name of this operator. Its name is truncation operator and not wildcard operator. Hence, this operator may only appear as a trailer and not in front of a word. Additionally, this operator would be considered as special character when part of a quotation marks enclosed phrase and, thus, ignored. The operator allows you to search for leading substrings in a fulltext search. Example: You want to search for Janis Joplin torrents but fear that some uploader has written her forename as Janice (yeah, some do). Your search should be: +Jani* +Joplin

8. Substring operators.

a. Substring operator %. If you want to search for substrings instead of words, you must enclose the substring in percent signs. Example: Your fulltext search for "the who" didn't return any result, because the word "the" as well as the word "who" are stopwords. So, your search should be: %the who %

b. Must have operator +. Same meaning as for fulltext. Example: You want to search for torrents in which "the who" and "magic bus" appear. Your search should be: +%the who % +%magic bus%

c. Must not have operator -. Same meaning as for fulltext. Example: You want to search for torrents in which "the who" appear but not "magic bus". Your search should be: +%the who % -%magic bus%

9. You may combine fulltext and substring searches, but they don't influence one another. The results of the two searches are ORed together. Example: +%the who % +"magic bus" doesn't return only torrents where "the who" and "magic bus" appear. Instead, this combined search would return all torrents, in which either the substring "the who " or the phrase "magic bus" appear.

Don't forget to try a fulltext search first if you want to keep the database responsive...  ;-)