MINUS (-)

Use the MINUS operator to lower the score of documents that contain unwanted noise terms. MINUS is useful when you want to search for documents that contain one query term but want the presence of a second term to cause a document to be ranked lower.

Syntax

Syntax Description

term1-term2

term1 minus term2

 Returns documents that contain term1. Calculates score by subtracting the score of term2 from the score of term1. Only documents with positive score are returned.

Example for MINUS Operator

Suppose a query on the term cars always returned high scoring documents about Ford cars. You can lower the scoring of the Ford documents by using the expression:

'cars - Ford'

In essence, this expression returns documents that contain the term cars and possibly Ford.However, the score for a returned document is the score of cars minus the score of Ford.

“NOT (~)”