Search Parameters

Thunderstone Search Appliance Manual

The possible parameters that can be used in the query string are:

Queries:

cq - Category query: cq=1 for first category, cq=2 for second, etc. Can be provided multiple times or as a CSV to include results in any of those categories.
cqall - Setting to Y requires results to be in all cq categories, instead of any one of them
dq - Maximum Depth query
mtq - Mime Type query (e.g. mtq=text/*)
query - Main search query
sq - Site query (e.g. sq=docs.company.com)
tq - Title-only query
uq - URL query (e.g. uq=https://www.example.com/dir/*)

Search control:

dateSource - What date to use, id or Modified (see below)
mdgt - Modified Date Greater Than: Only results with a modified date less than this will be returned.
mdlt - Modified Date Less Than: Only results with a modified date less than this will be returned.
pr - Specifies the Parametric Search Appliance profile
prox - Proximity: Only return results with the query words in the same line, sentence, paragraph, or page (default)
order - Controls the sort order. Values are r (relevance), dd (newest first), or da (oldest first). In version 17.1 and later, rank may be given as an alias for r (relevance), date for dd (newest first), and size, visited or depth may also be given. For Parametric appliances, may also be a list of Parametric Fields (and/or any of the above values, if version 17.1 or later) to sort by; see the Sortable checkbox for Parametric Search Options, here.
rpp - Results Per Page (see also Max User Results Per Page search setting, here)
sr - Results Per Site
sufs - Word forms (suffixes). Values are 0 (Exact match), 1 (Plurals & Possessives), 2 (Any word forms), or 3 (Custom)

Rank Knobs: controls the influence of ranking parameters. Each can be set to an integer value, from off (0) to Maximum(1000). Medium (500) is the default.

rorder - Word order: Favors results with query terms in the same order as the query
rprox - Rank Proximity: Favors results with query terms close together
rdfreq Database Frequency: Favors results with query terms more rare across the entire profile
rwfreq - Document Frequency: Favors results with query terms repeated more often
rlead - Position In Text: Favors results with query terms earlier in the document
rdepth - Depth In Site: Results more shallow depth (fewer clicks from the Base URL) are better

Parametric Fields and related:

gb - restrict the Group Bys performed to one or more named fields. The Group Bys must still be configured in the admin interface (see here), but the gb parameter allows you to further restrict Group Bys to fewer than would be performed otherwise.

See also Parametric Search Queries (here) for information on searching parametric fields, and specifying parametric search details.

dateSource: id vs modified

The dateSource parameter allows you to determine which date associated with the URL gets used for display, sorting, etc.

Modified (default) - The time the content was last modified
id - The time that Parametric Search Appliance last updated its record of the content

If a collection of files that were modified a year ago were picked up by the Parametric Search Appliance walk last night, then the Modified date would be a year ago, but the id date would be last night.

id is the default dateSource when requesting an RSS feed of a search.

Other Variables

dropXSL - When Results Style (here) is set to XSL Stylesheet, or the search request URL is search/main.xml (note the .xml extension), the dropXSL query variable controls how the XSL is applied. It may have one of the following values:
- html - Apply the XSL style sheet server-side and serve the resulting HTML
- no - Do not apply XSL, nor give an XSL reference. Browsers will display the raw XML. Can be useful for debugging/analyzing XML results.
- yes - Do not apply the XSL, but give an XSL reference so that browsers will fetch and apply the XSL client-side.
If not given, dropXSL is set based on the search/main.ext file extension in the URL: no if .xml was given, html otherwise.

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