Question

I am using Lucene to allow a user to search for words in a large number of documents. Lucene seems to default to returning all documents containing any of the words entered.

Is it possible to change this behaviour? I know that ‘+’ can be use to force a term to be included but I would like to make that the default action.

Ideally I would like functionality similar to Google’s: ‘-‘ to exclude words and ‘abc xyz’ to group words.

Just to clarify I also thought of inserting ‘+’ into all spaces in the query. I just wanted to avoid detecting grouped terms (brackets, quotes etc) and potentially breaking the query. Is there another approach?

Answer 1

This looks similar to the Lucene Sentence Search question. If you’re interested, this is how I answered that question:

String defaultField = ...; Analyzer analyzer = ...; QueryParser queryParser = new QueryParser(defaultField, analyzer);  queryParser.setDefaultOperator(QueryParser.Operator.AND);  Query query = queryParser.parse('Searching is fun');