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The Programmers Heaven advanced search engine helps you to find what you are looking for quickly and easily. This page details the many features that it offers.

Search Tips

Here are some quick tips to help you with your search.

• Searches are not case sensitive.
• You can use the boolean operators AND, OR and NOT. When you do not connect words using boolean operators, AND is used by default.
• Punctuation marks such as the period (.), colon (:), semicolon (;), and comma (,) are ignored during a search.
• Highly common words such as "a", "an", "and", "as" and "the" are ignored in a search, or are used as place holders in an exact phrase search.
• The wildcard * matches any number of characters, and the wildcard ? matches any single character.

Examples

• PHP tutorial - Will find items that contain the words "PHP" and "tutorial".
  
• Delphi AND Programming - Will only find items where both Delphi and Programming exist.
  
• Delphi OR Basic - Will find items where either Delphi, Basic or both exist.
  
• Delphi AND NOT Basic - Will find items that contain Delphi but do not contain Basic.
  
• "Visual Studio" - Will find items containing the exact phrase "Visual Studio".
  
• graph* - Will find all items containing words starting with graph, e.g. graphs, graphic, graphics.
  
• games w/5 C - Will find all items that have the word games within 5 words of the word C.
  
• * p%%olymorphizm - Will do a fuzzy search, allowing one letter to be different. This is useful if you are unsure how to spell a word.
  
• hack~ - Will use stemming and match "hack", "hacking", "hacker" etc

Detailed Search Information

Basic Queries
If you enter a search term and don't put any special key words in it, the search engine will treat it as if you put AND between each word, and therefore will only find items that contain all of the words. For example, a query for "C++ IDE" (without the quotes) will only return items that contain both "C++" and "IDE", and will leave out items that have "C++" and not "IDE" or vice versa.

Ignored Words
Very common words, such as "if", "a", "an" and "the", are ignored in your search. They will appear in so many items that they are unlikely to help you find what you are looking for.

Searching For Exact Phrases
If you put a phrase "between quotes" then it will look for that exact phrase. Note that in all other examples in this article the quotes are around them for clarity, not out of need to be there. Only enclose something in quotes if you want to find that exact phrase. For example, "visual basic source".

Boolean Searches
You can use the boolean operators "AND", "OR" and "NOT". For example, searching for "C++ OR IDE" (without the quotes) will find items that contain "C++", "IDE" or both of these words. Another example is "vb AND NOT .net", which will find any items that contain "vb" and do not contain ".net". This is not equivalent to "vb NOT .net" - you can only use "NOT" on it's own if you are putting an instruction to the search engine immediately after it (see below for examples).

Wildcards
There are a number of wild cards supported by the search engine. Putting * will match any number of characters (e.g. "graph*" would find graphs, graphics etc.) and ? will match an individual character (e.g. "?D graphics" would find "2D graphics" and "3D graphics"). If you put ~ at the end of the word, it will search for alternative gramatical endings that the word could have. For example, "hack~" would find "hack", "hacker" and "hacking".

Words Within A Given Range
Sometimes the most relevant results will be found if certain words are near to each other. For example, take these two examples:-

• KDE is an IDE for developing C++ applications.
• C++ is not as good as JAVA. (10 paragraphs of text trying to explain why) You can find an IDE for JAVA development at... (more text)

If you are looking for an IDE for C++ development, the first result is going to be relevant, whereas the second is most probably not going to be. The results that are most likely to be relevant will have the words "C++" and "IDE" near to each other. You can specify how close two words in your search must be by putting w/N, replacing N with the maximum number of words apart the search terms can be. For example, "C++ w/5 IDE" would find the first relevant result, but not the second one. You can put the NOT boolean operator before w/N to not return results with two words closer than a certain number of words, e.g. "hacking NOT w/5 cracking".

Fuzzy Search
Sometimes you may want to search for something, but not be certain how to spell it, or there might be multiple spellings (e.g. English colour vs. American color). You use the % sign to enable fuzzy searching in a word, for example "p%olymorphizm". Putting % would allow one letter to differ, putting %% would allow two to differ (e.g. "p%%olimorphizm") and so on.

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