Search tips 🔍️

1. Query modes

Tapesearch supports three query modes, selectable via the Query syntax option in the search settings:

Lucene (default) — Full Apache Lucene query syntax. Supports AND/OR/NOT, quoted phrases, wildcards, fuzzy matching, proximity searches, and field-scoped queries. If the query cannot be parsed (e.g. unmatched brackets), the search automatically falls back to plain text mode.

Simple — A forgiving parser using simple_query_string. Uses + (AND), | (OR) and - (NOT) instead of words. Quoted phrases and prefix wildcards (word*) are supported. Invalid syntax is silently ignored rather than causing an error.

Default — Plain text. All Lucene reserved characters are treated as literals. Use this when your query contains characters like ! [ ] ( ) that you want matched verbatim, e.g. Fox News is NOT your Friend! [opinion].

2. Searchable fields

Tapesearch searches across four fields: transcript, summary, episodeTitle and podcastTitle. The toggle bar lets you enable or disable each group.

In Lucene mode you can also scope a query to a specific field. For example, to find episodes that mention "Luke Skywalker" in the transcript but not in the title:

transcript:"Luke Skywalker" AND NOT episodeTitle:"Luke Skywalker" AND NOT podcastTitle:"Luke Skywalker"

3. Quoted phrases

Surround words in double quotes to search for an exact phrase (word order matters):

You can combine multiple quoted phrases with AND/OR in Lucene mode:

4. Boolean operators (Lucene mode)

Boolean operators must be written in ALL CAPS.

4.1 OR (default)

Returns results containing either term. OR is the default, so a space between terms has the same effect:

is the same as

4.2 AND

Both terms must appear in the same document:

4.3 NOT

Excludes documents containing the term after NOT:

4.4 + and -

+ requires a term; - excludes it:

5. Grouping (Lucene mode)

Use parentheses to control precedence:

6. Wildcards (Lucene mode)

* matches zero or more characters; ? matches exactly one character. Cannot be used as the first character of a term.

matches invest, investor, investing, etc.

matches test, text, etc.

7. Fuzzy & proximity searches (Lucene mode)

7.1 Fuzzy

Append ~ to a word to match similar spellings (useful for typos). Optionally specify edit distance 0–2:

7.2 Proximity

Append ~N to a quoted phrase to find the words within N positions of each other:

8. Escaping special characters (Lucene mode)

The following characters have special meaning in Lucene mode and must be escaped with \ if you want them treated as literals:

If your query contains these characters and you do not want Lucene syntax, switch to Default mode instead.