8.1.3.3 The gmane Engine

The gmane engine requires no configuration.

Gmane queries follow a simple query language:

‘Boolean query operators’

AND, OR, NOT (or AND NOT), and XOR are supported, and brackets can be used to control operator precedence, e.g. (emacs OR xemacs) AND linux. Note that operators must be written with all capital letters to be recognised.

‘Required and excluded terms’

+ and - can be used to require or exclude terms, e.g. football -american

‘Unicode handling’

The search engine converts all text to utf-8, so searching should work in any language.

‘Stopwords’

Common English words (like 'the' and 'a') are ignored by default. You can override this by prefixing such words with a + (e.g. +the) or enclosing the word in quotes (e.g. "the").

The query can be limited to articles by a specific author using a prefix-arg. After inputting the query this will prompt for an author name (or part of a name) to match.