A leading plus sign indicates that this word must be present in each row that is returned. Examples: +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”.
A leading minus sign indicates that this word must not be present in any of the rows that are returned. Note: The - operator acts only to exclude rows that are otherwise matched by other search terms. Thus, a boolean-mode search that contains only terms preceded by - returns an empty result. It does not return “all rows except those containing any of the excluded terms.” Example: +apple -macintosh Find rows that contain the word “apple” but not “macintosh”.
Example: apple banana Find rows that contain at least one of the two words.
The > operator increases the contribution and the < operator decreases it. Example: +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”.
This is useful for marking “noise” words. A row containing such a word is rated lower than others, but is not excluded altogether, as it would be with the - operator. Example: +apple ~macintosh Find rows that contain the word “apple”, but if the row also contains the word “macintosh”, rate it lower than if row does not. This is “softer” than a search for '+apple -macintosh', for which the presence of “macintosh” causes the row not to be returned at all.
Unlike the other operators, it should be appended to the word to be affected. Words match if they begin with the word preceding the * operator. If stopword or too-short word is specified with the truncation operator, it will not be stripped from a boolean query. Examples: apple* Find rows that contain words such as “apple”, “apples”, “applesauce”, or “applet”. A search for '+word +stopword*' will likely return fewer rows than a search for '+word +stopword' because the former query remains as is and requires stopword* to be present in a document. The latter query is transformed to +word.
The full-text engine splits the phrase into words, performs a search in the FULLTEXT index for the words. Nonword characters need not be matched exactly: Phrase searching requires only that matches contain exactly the same words as the phrase and in the same order. For example, "test phrase" matches "test, phrase". If the phrase contains no words that are in the index, the result is empty. Example: "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 enclose the phrase are operator characters that delimit the phrase. They are not the quotes that enclose the search string itself.
