How to search PEG mailing lists

Selecting the Search Index

PEG maintains a large number of related mailing lists (currently 51). Not all of them are currently searchable. Most will eventually be searchable, but even if they were all searchable, it doesn't necessarily make sense to search every list, all the time. The list names in bold on the PEG search page are searchable. To include a particular list in your search, make sure its box is checked. For the curious, even in its incomplete state, our search engine has indexed over 75,000 messages.

Result Limits

We limit the search engine to providing 1000 hits. You change choose the number of hits per page, we've defaulted it to 50 which is a pretty good number.

Result Display

The search dynamicly builds a selection of web pages which are presented to you either just as a series of links, or with the Author, Date and an extract of text from the message. Leave it as normal, I don't see a reason to change it.

Sort By

The search engine we use, Namazu, scores the search results. You can rank by score, by date descending (the default we've chosen), by title, by author, by size and by URI. We suspect either by score or by date descending will be most effective.

Single term query

The query specifies only one term for retrieving all documents which contain the term. e.g.,

move-to-top

AND query

The query specifies two or more terms for retrieving all documents which contain both terms. You can insert the and operator between the terms. e.g.,

X-Document and append-child

You can omit the and operator. Terms which are separated by one ore more spaces are assumed to be an AND query.

OR query

The query specifies two or more terms for retrieving all documents which contain either term. You can insert the or operator between the terms. e.g.,

X-Noderef or X-Document

NOT query

The query specifies two or more terms for retrieving all documents which contain a first term but doesn't contain the following terms. You can insert the not operator between the terms to do NOT query. e.g.,

XML not SAX

Grouping

You can group queries by surrounding them by parentheses. The parentheses should be separated by one or more spaces. e.g.,

( X-Noderef or X-Document ) and XML not SAX

Phrase searching

You can search for a phrase which consists of two or more terms by surrounding them with double quotes like "..." or with braces like {...}. PEG uses the Namazu search engine, so the precision of phrase searching is not 100 %; it can cause wrong results occasionally.

{GNU Emacs}

Substring matching

The are three types of substring matching searching.

Prefix matching
inter* (terms which begin with inter)
Inside matching
*text* (terms which contain text)
Suffix matching
*net (terms which terminated with net)

Regular expressions

You can use regular expressions for pattern matching. The regular expressions must be surrounded by slashes like /.../. The Namazu search engine uses Ruby's regular regular expressions engine. It offers generally Perl compatible flavor. e.g.,

/pro(gram|blem)s?/

Field-specified searching

You can limit your search to specific fields such as Subject:, From:, Message-Id:. It's especially convenient for Mail/News documents. e.g.,

Notes