Getting answers to specific queries is of course the whole point of Recoll. The multiple provided interfaces always understand simple queries made of one or several words, and return appropriate results in most cases.
In order to make the most of Recoll though, it may be worthwhile to understand how it processes your input. Five different modes exist:
In
All Termsmode, Recoll looks for documents containing all your input terms.The
Query Languagemode behaves likeAll Termsin the absence of special input, but it can also do much more. This is the best mode for getting the most of Recoll. It is usable from all possible interfaces (GUI, command line, WEB UI, ...), and is described here.In
Any Termmode, Recoll looks for documents containing any your input terms, preferring those which contain more.In
File Namemode, Recoll will only match file names, not content. Using a small subset of the index allows things like left-hand wildcards without performance issues, and may sometimes be useful.The GUI
Advanced Searchmode is actually not more powerful than the query language, but it helps you build complex queries without having to remember the language, and avoids any interpretation ambiguity, as it bypasses the user input parser.
These five input modes are supported by the different user interfaces which are described in the following sections.
