Search Tips for Webglimpse

Webglimpse supports boolean queries and wildcards, as well as some limited regular expressions. Words separated by spaces are treated as a phrase. You can use ';' for AND, ',' for OR, and '~' for NOT, along with parenthesis, and the '#' character for wildcard matching.

Example boolean queries:

will match documents containing the words "tree" and "leaf" anywhere in the document
will match documents containing the words "tree" and "leaf" but not the word "binary"
will match documents containing the phrase "open source" or the word "shareware"

Example use of wildcard #:

will match 'language' and 'languages' but not 'slang' or 'clangs'. This is different than checking the 'partial match' box in the query form, which would match all three patterns.
will match all patterns mentioned above - 'languages', 'language', 'slang' and 'clangs'. This is the same effect as checking the 'partial match' box, but checking the box would be faster.
will match patterns like www.anything.com
When using complex queries like the above, you may sometimes get matches to code inside HTML tags instead of to the visible text in the file. To avoid this, check the "Use Filters" box in the search options form. (You should always check this box when searching non-ascii type documents, like PDF or Word files. If you don't see it on the form, it may have been automatically checked for you in a hidden tag.)

There's more...

The above examples cover the most common types of queries. Webglimpse (and glimpse) also can accept a limited form of regular expressions, including support for the '|', '*', '[]' characters and parentheses. Please see the Glimpse man page Patterns section for all the gory details. You will need to know that Webglimpse calls glimpse with the switches -U -W -j -y -z , plus others determined by the checkboxes on the form. View the source of the results page for the exact call to glimpse made by a particular webglimpse query.