Simple Query Language and Metadata

Introduction

An effective search system must provide a query language which is:

Powerful
Intuitive
Natural

At the same time, it is desirable for the language to be reasonably easy to parse in software.

Gnutella2 employs a simple query language that is familiar to users of web search engines and allows most common criteria to be entered intuitively.

Query Language Definition

Every search string is considered a list of words.
Words are identified as sequences of alphanumeric characters. Other symbols and white space are ignored.
In the basic case, every word in the list must appear one or more times in a matching string.
Words may be marked as negative words or excluded words by prefixing them with a dash (-).
In this case, every positive word in the list must appear and every negative word must not appear in a matching string.
Words can be grouped together with quotes. The negation operator (-) may not appear inside a quoted string, but it may prefix a quoted string in which case the negation is applied to the quoted string as a whole.
The words in a quoted string must appear in the same order in a matching string. Conversely, the words in a negated quoted string must not appear or must not appear in the same order in a matching string.

Examples


Cat Dog
(matches strings with "cat" and "dog", in any order)

-Cat Dog
(matches strings with "dog" but not "cat", in any order)

-Cat -Dog
(matches strings with neither "cat" nor "dog", illegal in an external search as there are no positive words)

"cat dog"
(matches strings with "cat" followed by "dog", "cat dog" matches, "dog cat" does not)

-"cat dog"
(matches strings without "cat dog", "cat dog" does not match, "dog cat" does)

"cat dog" -fish
(matches strings with "cat dog" and without "fish")

Metadata Searching

Searching metadata involves a set of specific rules:

If a metadata schema is specified as search criteria, matching objects that have metadata must share the same schema
Metadata can only be compared if criteria and object share the same schema
Each data member (attribute or element) of metadata is compared separately
Where a member is specified in the criteria but not in the object, the match fails
Where a member is specified in the object but not in the criteria, the member is ignored
The search criteria for each text/string member is in the simple query language defined above
The search criteria for numeric members is range based, defined in a subsequent section.

Numeric Range Matching

When comparing numeric values, the match function is specified by the search criteria:

If a value is specified, the value must match exactly
If a range (X-Y) is specified, the value must lie within that inclusive range
If (X-) is specified, the value must be greater than or equal to X
If (-X) is specified, the value must be less than or equal to X

Generic Matching on Metadata

Generic search criteria (/Q2/DN) can be matched against metadata fields, however care must be taken not to match against data members which are not directly descriptive to the object. Client-side schema descriptors are a good solution, listing the scope of a general search on each recognised schema.