Restricting Search Scope

To define a scope means to specify a more precise location of a document or to restrict the search query to a particular range. Url scoping is particularly useful as Alkaline is capable of indexing multiple sites with the same daemon.

Host scope is specified by adding the rightmost part of a host entry, such as host:.host.com to the search query. For example, to search foo in documents at http://www.foo.com, the following command should be issued: foo host:.foo.com . It is possible to specify multiple hosts by writing more than one host: elements in your search string. For example: host:.bar.com host:.foo.com +foo -bar will return all documents indexed at *.foo.com, *.bar.com containing "foo" and not containing "bar".

Path scope is specified by adding the leftmost part of a path without the leading slash, such as path:foo/bar to the search string. For example, to search foo in documents at http://www.foo.com/foo/bar, the following command should be issued: host:www.foo.com path:foo/bar foo .

Url scope is specified by adding the leftmost part of a complete url, including the leading http:// , such as url:http://www.foo.com/bar or url:file:///foo/bar to the search string. If you choose to omit the protocol, http:// is assumed. For example, to search foo in documents at http://www.foo.com/bar, the following command should be issued: url:www.foo.com/bar foo . To specify a scope to urls with spaces and other special characters, use the encoded url value, such as url:www.foo.com/foo%20bar .

File extension scope is specified by adding the rightmost part of a filename without the leading dot, such as ext:cpp,h to the search string. Multiple extensions can either be specified separated by commas or by adding more than one ext: parameter to the search string. For example to search foo in all .bar documents, the following command should be issued: ext:bar foo .

Alkaline will return documents matching the search query and any of the host:, path: or url: scope options and the ext: scope delimiter, if present. As usual if no scope is specified, the entire indexed domain is searched. It is possible to specify multiple values in all scope delimiters by separating them with commas or by adding multiple scope options to the search string.

Meta scoping is specified by adding meta:name1[,name2] to the search string. Multiple meta tag names can either be separated by commas or by adding more than one meta: parameter to the search string. For example to search foo bar in all keywords only, the following command should be issued: foo bar meta:keywords , which is equivalent to keywords:foo keywords:bar . Meta scoping was added in version 1.6.