Advanced search terms

This article is an advanced look at the search operators used in the search bar on data.world. For an introduction to all search capabilities including filtering search results and finding similar data start with the article on finding data.

There is a lot of information on data.world, and finding just the data asset that you're looking for can be a daunting task. Fortunately the robust search options available with the data.world search engine enable you to craft just the right search string to find what you're looking for. From the search bar (located at the top of your homepage and on many other data.world pages), you can search for an exact match of a string of words, or you can search for matches of individual words in the search string. Additionally, you can qualify your search with various operators, or perform complex searches combining operators. In this article we'll cover:

• Basic text search
• Logical operators AND, OR, and NOT
• Other operators: 
  • tag
  • user and org
  • owner and creator
  • file
  • table
  • column
  • resourcetype
  • extension
  • visibility
  • created and updated
• Tokenization
• Complex searches

Basic text search

In a basic text search (no operators) the search engine looks for a match to your search terms in the following places:

• Title of project, dataset, or query
• Description of project or dataset
• Summary of project or dataset
• Tags
• Insights
• User and organization names

If you have a search string with more than one word in it you can structure your search so that the search engine looks for an exact match of the string or looks for individual words and searches for items that have all of the words in any order. To search for the entire string, put double quotes around that string (" "). The search engine then looks for instances of that exact string and only returns items which contain it. Spaces, hyphens or underscores in search strings are not tokenized if there are double-quotes around the string. Searches with multiple words in them that are not bounded by double quotes return items that have all of the words in the search string. Here are some examples:

• "Medicare hospital spending" - returns only data assets with the exact phrase Medicare hospital spending in them
• Medicare hospital spending - returns results that include Medicare, hospital, and spending, but they don't have to be in that order 

Logical operators AND, OR, and NOT

The operators AND, OR, and NOT can all be used to restrict results returned from a search.

AND

Using the operator AND is not necessary because AND is the default operator for searches on data.world.

OR

The OR operator is tricky to use because we do not yet allow complex searches with different logical operators and as the AND operator is implicit it's easy to miss that you're combining different logical operators in a search. Look at the following search strings for example:

• "colony collapse" - returns only results with the string colony collapse
• colony collapse - returns anything with the words colony and collapse somewhere in the search fields
• "colony disorder" - returns only results with the string colony disorder
• colony disorder - returns anything with the words colony and disorder somewhere in the search fields
• "colony collapse" OR "colony disorder" - returns only items with the string colony collapse or the string colony disorder
• colony collapse OR colony disorder is an illegal search because written out fully it means search for colony AND collapse OR colony AND disorder and the search engine can't parse the combined AND/OR statement

NOT

Sometimes a search will return a lot of items that are related to each other and not of interest to you and you need to be able to winnow out extraneous results. E.g.:

• wildlife - Returns several thousand results--many of which seem to be about wildlife refuges instead of wildlife.

Insert the operator NOT before the text you want left out of your search and you can cut the number of results significantly.

• wildlife NOT refuge - Gets the number down significantly and shows you what else you might want to remove.

The NOT operator, like the AND operator, can be used more than once in a search:

• wildlife NOT refuge NOT "us-doi-gov" - Returns results that match wildlife and do not contain refuge or us-doi-gov. At this point you might have a better idea what keywords are common to the results you want and you can search fro them with AND or OR.

Though you can use the same logical operator as many times as you would like in your search, you cannot combine different logical operators in the same search.

Allowed:

• this AND that AND "the other"
• this NOT that NOT "the other"
• this that "the other
• this OR that OR "the other"

Not allowed:

• this AND that OR "the other"
• this AND that NOT "the other"
• this that AND the other
• this OR that AND "the other"
• this that NOT "the other"
• this OR that NOT "the other" 

Other operators

Keywords can also be used with a set of data.world-specific operators to further qualify your searches. There is a common set of rules that govern the use of these operators and it is consistent across all of them. For all keyword operators:

• The syntax of an operator search string is operator:keyword where operator is the name of the operator and keyword is the string you want to match.
• There is no space after the colon (operator:keyword, not operator: keyword).
• If there is more than one word in a search string you will need to use double quotes to match the entire string: 
  • operator:"keyword1 keyword2" not operator:keyword1 keyword2. The latter search would return results for operator:keyword1 and a match in any of the searchable strings for keyword2. 

The following keyword operators and qualifiers are currently supported as search parameters: 

• tag
• user and org
• owner and creator
• file
• table 
• column
• resourcetype - choices are:
  • dataset
  • project
  • insight
  • file
  • table
  • query
  • catalogTable
  • catalog
  • term
  • datatype
  • analysis
• extension
• visibility - qualifiers are:
  • open
  • private
• created and updated - qualifiers are:
  • > 
  • >=
  • <
  • <=
  • { } 

tag

The tag operator specifically searches against the tags associated with a dataset or project and returns a list of only the datasets and projects that have that tag. Partial and exact matches are allowed:

• tag:bee - Any dataset or project with the word 'bee' in its tag (e.g., 'bee', 'bees' and 'bee colony'). 
• tag:"bee" - Only datasets and projects with the exact tag 'bee'.
• tag:bees - Any dataset or project that has a tag which includes 'bees' (e.g., 'bees' and 'native bees') NOTE: Does not include datasets or projects with the tag 'bee'.
• tag:"bees knees" - Only datasets and projects with the exact tag 'bees knees'
• tag:bees knees - Any dataset or project that has a tag which includes 'bees' and the string 'knees' in any searchable field. 

user and org

The user and org operators search for a string found in the display name or the id of a user or organization respectively. The character "@" restricts the search to an exact match of the id: 

• user:dave - all users with the string dave in the login name or in the display name.
• user:"dave" - all users with the exact login name 'dave' or display name  'dave'.
• user:@dave and user:"@dave" - only the user whose id is @dave
• user:dave griffith - Users with 'dave' in either the login or display name, and 'griffith' in either the login or display name fields.
• user:da - Any user or organization with the leading string 'da' in either the login or display name
• user:"dave griffith" - Only the user whose display name is Dave Griffith.

• org:data - any organization with the string 'data' in either the the display name or the organization id.
• org:"denver"  and org:"@denver" - Only the organization with the id 'denver'.

NOTE: The search @name will return either the organization or the user with the id 'name'. 

owner and creator

The owner of an asset is the person or entity who was designated as such when the asset was created. If a person was selected as the owner, that person will also be the creator. If an organization was selected as the owner, the creator will still be the person who created the asset. The owner operator returns all  the datasets, projects, and insights owned by either a person or an organization. The creator operator returns all the datasets, projects, and insights created by a user. They both follow the same patterns as user and org:

• owner:dave - All datasets, projects and insights owned by any user or organization with 'dave' in either the display name or id.
• owner:"dave", owner:@dave, owner:"@dave" - All datasets, projects and insights owned by any user or organization with the exact display name or id 'dave'.
• owner:"dave griffith" - All datasets, projects and insights owned by the user whose display name is Dave Griffith.
• creator:@stateofny - everything created by the user with the login of stateofny regardless of whether the user or an organization that the user belongs to is the owner.
• owner:data-ny-gov - Everything owned by the organization data-ny-gov (created by individuals in the organization).

file

The way the search engine treats the file operator has been updated and file results are shown the same way as other primary assets like dataset, project, insight, etc. Now when you search for a file you get a list of all the files that match your search--not a list of the datasets and projects which use that file:

• file:bee - Returns a list of files with 'bee' in the name, and the location of the file is shown by the icon at the bottom of the result card. The orange icon indicates the file is located in a project, the blue icon indicates it's in a dataset:

• file:bee colony - Returns any file with 'bee' in the name and 'colony' in any other searchable field

resourcetype

The resourcetype operator allows you to search for either datasets, projects, or insights. It is best used in conjunction with another search string in a complex search (see the examples below under Complex Searches).

extension