The simplest type of search is a plain-text search, in which one or more words are entered into one or more fields. For example, if you wanted to find all posts in which the word 'steel' appeared in the subject and the author's name contained the word 'alex', you'd use the following (note that searches are not case-sensitive):
Subject: steel From: alex
Finding posts that have the word 'brent' in the 'From' field of the email and either 'wood' or 'steel' in the body, you'd do this:
From: brent Body: wood steel
You can also find posts by their original 'X-Yahoo-Number:' - i.e., the numbers that Yahoo used in their system. This is provided because some people used those numbers to refer to other posts in the group. Simply enter the exact number you're looking for in the 'Number' field.
In addition to plain-text searches, there are several modifiers that can be added to make your searches more precise and flexible. Here is the list, along with examples:
| [no operator] | implies an OR connecting the words |
| + | A leading plus sign means that this word must be present |
| - | A leading minus sign means this word must not be present |
| * | Wildcard operator. Unlike the other operators, it's added to the end of the word to be affected. Words match if they begin with the word preceding the * operator. |
| " | A phrase in double quotes only matches posts that contain the phrase. |
| () | Parentheses group words into expressions. |
| > < | These two operators increase or decrease the ranking of a matched entry (i.e., put it closer to the top of the list); see the examples at the bottom. |
NOTE: Entries from the stopword list (a list of common, short words like 'the', 'and', etc.) will be ignored. See the full stopword list at the end of this article. In addition, words of less than 4 characters long as not indexed; e.g., searching for 'net', 'sea', or '"bad rod"' (a phrase composed of two too-short words) will produce 0 results.
Find entries that contain the word "apple", but rank them higher if they also contain "macintosh":
+apple >macintosh
Find entries with "apple" and "turnover" or "apple" and "strudel" (in any order), but rank "apple turnover" higher than "apple strudel".
+apple +(>turnover <strudel)
Find entries that contain words such as "apple", "apples", "applesauce", or "applet".
apple*
Find entries that contain the exact phrase "some words" (for example, ones that contain "some words of wisdom" but not "some noise words").
"some words"
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