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DocumentCloud's search is powered by Solr, an open source search engine by the Apache Software Foundation. Most of the search syntax is passed through directly to Solr — you can read Solr's documentation directly for information on how its syntax works. This document will reiterate the parts of that syntax that are applicable to DocumentCloud, as well as parts of the search that are specific to DocumentCloud.
DocumentCloud’s search field can help you construct complex Solr queries with a couple of keystrokes. Apply filters and search the text of all the documents in our system.
Save a complex search into the sidebar, then return to it later. Saved searches can be renamed or edited at any time.
You may specify either single words to search for, such as document or report, or a phrase of multiple words to be matched as a whole, by surrounding it in double quotes, such as "the mueller report".
Terms can use ? to match any single character. For example ?oat will match both goat and boat. You may use * to match zero or more characters, so J* will match J, John, Jane or any other word beginning with a J. You may use these in any position of a term — beginning, middle or end.
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This feature is only available to authenticated users. You may register for a free account at https://accounts.muckrock.com/.
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By appending ~ to a term you can perform a fuzzy search which will match close variants of the term based on edit distance. Edit distance is the number of letter insertions, deletions, substitutions, or transpositions needed to get from one word to another. This can be useful for finding documents with misspelled words or with poor OCR. By default ~ will allow an edit distance of 2, but you can specify an edit distance of 1 by using ~1. For example, book~ will match book, books, and looks.
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This feature is only available to authenticated users. You may register for a free account at https://accounts.muckrock.com/.
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Proximity searches allow you to search for multiple words within a certain distance of each other. It is specified by using a ~ with a number after a phrase. For example, "mueller report"~10 will search for documents which contain the words mueller and report within 10 words of each other.