2007/1/18, Jean-Francois Dockes <<a href="mailto:jean-francois.dockes@wanadoo.fr">jean-francois.dockes@wanadoo.fr</a>>:<div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> Fabrice Colin writes: > On 1/17/07, Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen <<a href="mailto:mikkel.kamstrup@gmail.com">mikkel.kamstrup@gmail.com</a>> wrote: > > Regarding the user-level language now. Perhaps "flying Dutchman" would > > mean the unstemmed phrase (if supported), and 'flying Dutchman' > > (single quotes) could allow for stemming. This is not completely > > standard, but it doesn't break user expectation in horrible ways (as > > far as I can see). > > > I think it does. Double quotes usually express a phrase search.  My > opinion is we'd better leave stemming (and diacritic sensitivity) out > and let each back-end play its specific strengths as it likes to find > the best matches. When the user is searching for a specific form of a word (typically for a proper noun), he usually knows it. This is an important and basic piece of meta-information which the simple query language should be able to express as it can vastly improve results. The natural thing to do is to use capitalization (capitalized terms are searched as is), but this conflicts with case-sensitive searches if we really want them. I do not like the single quote solution that much, one reason being that single quotes sometimes make sense in words (O'Donnell). Spotlight allows adding search modifiers as letters after a double-quoted expression, like: "someword"cdw where c, d, w control case/diacritic sensitivity and whole word matching. This seems like a good solution. Is there a risk that this might be patented and does anyone know how to do a patent check ?</blockquote><div> I'm not a total fan of the spotlight language. It has several drawbacks:  - Case sensitive by default  - Non-google-like (uses fx. "property == value")  - Wildcards allowed anywhere within a string (can we match that?)  - Diacritics sensibility switch allowed by default Good things:  - A "known standard"  - Predefined values like time.today and time.now  - Allows ==, >=, >, <, and <= comparisons on attributes (which is unnatural with the google-like syntax "attribute:value")  - Phrase postfixes like "Paris"c to control case sensitivity and such.  - Apple must believe it is a good syntax Spotlight Query syntax reference: <a href="http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Carbon/Conceptual/SpotlightQuery/Concepts/QueryFormat.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40001849-CJBEJBHH"> http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Carbon/Conceptual/SpotlightQuery/Concepts/QueryFormat.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40001849-CJBEJBHH</a> Is there a syntax ref for the windows vista search tool? Cheers, Mikkel </div> </div>