Gmane
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Written by (Now accepts real names!)
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Welcome to the Xapian-powered Gmane search!

New:

  • 2008-05-16: Upgraded to a snapshot of Xapian SVN trunk. We're now using the new "chert" backend.
  • 2008-01-10: New "pre-filled form" feature.
  • 2007-06-22: Upgraded to Xapian 1.0.1. Queries are now stemmed by default. Term tokenisation uses an improved algorithm.
  • 2007-02-27: The index has been rebuilt with a new fallback algorithm to handle malformed "From:" headers.
  • 2006-12-04: Approved spam reports have now been removed from the search engine index.
  • 2006-12-03: Added "short url for this search" link to the results page.
  • 2006-12-03: group: and author: prefixes can now be used in the query.
  • 2006-12-02: Upgraded to Xapian 0.9.9, which fixes a few query parsing issues.

The source code for this search is available, licensed under the GPL.

Note: At present the index is being updated roughly once a day, so new articles may not be searchable until the next day. Sometimes development work can delay updates for a few days too. The most recent update was around 21 hour(s) ago.

Supported Features

Results sorting
You can order results by relevance, date (newest first), or reverse date (oldest first).
Boolean query operators
AND, OR, NOT (or AND NOT), and XOR are supported, and brackets can be used to control operator precedence, e.g. (debian OR ubuntu) 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 "" (e.g. "the").
Group Filter
The group filter can be a single Gmane group name (e.g. gmane.discuss) or a wildcarded hierarchy (e.g. gmane.comp.*). Since all groups start "gmane.", you can omit that. Note that arbitrary wildcards and substring matches aren't currently supported. You can also filter by or exclude groups by using (e.g.) group:gmane.linux.* or -group:gmane.linux.* in the main query.
Author Filter
The author filter accepts real names or a complete email address. Wildcards aren't currently supported. You can also filter by or exclude authors by using (e.g.) author:fred@example.com or -author:linus in the main query.

Adding a "Gmane Search" to your webpages

We encourage you to add a Gmane Search facility to your webpages if you think it would be useful to your visitors. Here are some examples of the HTML required to do it: 

<form method="get" action="http://search.gmane.org/">
<input type="text" name="query">
<input type="submit" value="Search Gmane">
</form>

You can restrict the search to a particular group by specifying the group CGI parameter:

<form method="get" action="http://search.gmane.org/">
<input type="text" name="query">
<input type="hidden" name="group" value="gmane.discuss">
<input type="submit" value="Search gmane.discuss">
</form>

Or perhaps you'd like the user to be able to choose the group from a small selection:

<form method="get" action="http://search.gmane.org/">
<input type="text" name="query">
<select name="group">
<option value="gmane.discuss">gmane.discuss</option>
<option value="gmane.test">gmane.test</option>
</select>
<input type="submit" value="Search">
</form>

For the future:

  • Sort by date could be a lot faster (as fast as Sort by reverse date)
  • Allow wildcards anywhere in group filter, e.g. *emacs*
  • Reenable phrase searching
  • Spelling correction
  • Add terms to allow searching for username part of an email address

Please report problems to gmane.discuss.

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