StealEngine, the Hot Deal Search Engine, with notifications!

What's the deal?

StealEngine finds the latest deals on the web so you don't have to. To get started, simply sign up and save a few search queries to your "wishlist".

What are my notification options?

StealEngine provides you with two ways to receive your results: email and RSS. If you opt for email notifications, you will instantly receive an email when an item on your wishlist goes on sale. RSS feeds offer advanced users a more "passive" experience for your notifications, this allows you to view a list of results at your convenience. You will never miss a deal again!

Email:

  • Add your email address under the account settings and check the emailenabled button.
  • Check the email button next to each item on your wishlist, this allows you to tune your notifications preferences.

RSS:

  • Simply copy the link found under the account tab and subscribe in your favorite RSS reader
  • Tips for setting up an RSS reader can be found here.
  • More information than you probably need can be found here.

Keys to a successful search:

  • Be as specific as possible and use quotes, e.g.:
    • "sony playstation"
  • Exclude results you don't want with the "-" symbol, e.g.:
    • "sony" -playstation

Warning, nerd alert:


Boolean queries allow the following special operators to be used:

  • explicit operator AND:
    hello & world
  • operator OR:
    hello | world
  • operator NOT:
    hello -world
    hello !world
    
  • grouping:
    ( hello world )

Here's an example query which uses all these operators:

Boolean query example

( cat -dog ) | ( cat -mouse)


There always is implicit AND operator, so "hello world" query actually means "hello & world".

OR operator precedence is higher than AND, so "looking for cat | dog | mouse" means "looking for ( cat | dog | mouse )" and not "(looking for cat) | dog | mouse".

Queries like "-dog", which implicitly include all documents from the collection, can not be evaluated. This is both for technical and performance reasons. Performance-wise, when the collection is huge (ie. 10-100M documents), evaluating such queries could take very long.


The following special operators and modifiers can be used when using the extended matching mode:

  • operator OR:

    hello | world
  • operator NOT:

    hello -world
    hello !world
    

  • field search operator:

    @title hello @body world
  • field position limit modifier :

    @body[50] hello
  • multiple-field search operator:

    @(title,body) hello world
  • all-field search operator:

    @* hello
  • phrase search operator:

    "hello world"
  • proximity search operator:

    "hello world"~10
  • quorum matching operator:

    "the world is a wonderful place"/3
  • strict order operator (aka operator "before"):

    aaa << bbb << ccc
  • exact form modifier:

    raining =cats and =dogs
  • field-start and field-end modifier:

    ^hello world$
  • NEAR, generalized proximity operator:

    hello NEAR/3 world NEAR/4 "my test"
  • SENTENCE operator:

    all SENTENCE words SENTENCE "in one sentence"
  • PARAGRAPH operator:

    "Bill Gates" PARAGRAPH "Steve Jobs"
  • zone limit operator:

    ZONE:(h4,h6) only in these titles

Here's an example query that uses some of these operators:

Extended matching mode: query example

"hello world" @title "example program"~5 @body python -(php|perl) @* code


The full meaning of this search is:

  • Find the words 'hello' and 'world' adjacently in any field in a document;

  • Additionally, the same document must also contain the words 'example' and 'program' in the title field, with up to, but not including, 5 words between the words in question; (E.g. "example PHP program" would be matched however "example script to introduce outside data into the correct context for your program" would not because two terms have 5 or more words between them)

  • Additionally, the same document must contain the word 'python' in the body field, but not contain either 'php' or 'perl';

  • Additionally, the same document must contain the word 'code' in any field.

There always is implicit AND operator, so "hello world" means that both "hello" and "world" must be present in matching document.

OR operator precedence is higher than AND, so "looking for cat | dog | mouse" means "looking for ( cat | dog | mouse )" and not "(looking for cat) | dog | mouse".

Field limit operator limits subsequent searching to a given field. Normally, query will fail with an error message if given field name does not exist in the searched index. However, that can be suppressed by specifying "@@relaxed" option at the very beginning of the query:

@@relaxed @nosuchfield my query

This can be helpful when searching through heterogeneous indexes with different schemas.

Field position limit, additionaly restricts the searching to first N position within given field (or fields). For example, "@body[50] hello" will not match the documents where the keyword 'hello' occurs at position 51 and below in the body.

Proximity distance is specified in words, adjusted for word count, and applies to all words within quotes. For instance, "cat dog mouse"~5 query means that there must be less than 8-word span which contains all 3 words, ie. "CAT aaa bbb ccc DOG eee fff MOUSE" document will not match this query, because this span is exactly 8 words long.

Quorum matching operator introduces a kind of fuzzy matching. It will only match those documents that pass a given threshold of given words. The example above ("the world is a wonderful place"/3) will match all documents that have at least 3 of the 6 specified words.

Strict order operator (aka operator "before"), will match the document only if its argument keywords occur in the document exactly in the query order. For instance, "black << cat" query (without quotes) will match the document "black and white cat" but not the "that cat was black" document. Order operator has the lowest priority. It can be applied both to just keywords and more complex expressions, ie. this is a valid query:

(bag of words) << "exact phrase" << red|green|blue

Exact form keyword modifier will match the document only if the keyword occurred in exactly the specified form. The default behaviour is to match the document if the stemmed keyword matches. For instance, "runs" query will match both the document that contains "runs" and the document that contains "running", because both forms stem to just "run" - while "=runs" query will only match the first document. Exact form operator requires index_exact_words option to be enabled. This is a modifier that affects the keyword and thus can be used within operators such as phrase, proximity, and quorum operators.

Field-start and field-end keyword modifiers, will make the keyword match only if it occurred at the very start or the very end of a fulltext field, respectively. For instance, the query "^hello world$" (with quotes and thus combining phrase operator and start/end modifiers) will only match documents that contain at least one field that has exactly these two keywords.

Arbitrarily nested brackets and negations are allowed. However, the query must be possible to compute without involving an implicit list of all documents:

// correct query
aaa -(bbb -(ccc ddd))

// queries that are non-computable
-aaa
aaa | -bbb

NEAR operator is a generalized version of a proximity operator. The syntax is NEAR/N, it is case-sensitive, and no spaces are allowed beetwen the NEAR keyword, the slash sign, and the distance value.

The original proximity operator only worked on sets of keywords. NEAR is more generic and can accept arbitrary subexpressions as its two arguments, matching the document when both subexpressions are found within N words of each other, no matter in which order. NEAR is left associative and has the same (lowest) precedence as BEFORE.

You should also note how a (one NEAR/7 two NEAR/7 three) query using NEAR is not really equivalent to a ("one two three"~7) one using keyword proximity operator. The difference here is that the proximity operator allows for up to 6 non-matching words between all the 3 matching words, but the version with NEAR is less restrictive: it would allow for up to 6 words between 'one' and 'two' and then for up to 6 more between that two-word matching and a 'three' keyword.

SENTENCE and PARAGRAPH operators, matches the document when both its arguments are within the same sentence or the same paragraph of text, respectively. The arguments can be either keywords, or phrases, or the instances of the same operator. Here are a few examples:

one SENTENCE two
one SENTENCE "two three"
one SENTENCE "two three" SENTENCE four

The order of the arguments within the sentence or paragraph does not matter. These operators only work on indexes built with index_sp (sentence and paragraph indexing feature) enabled, and revert to a mere AND otherwise. Refer to the index_sp directive documentation for the notes on what's considered a sentence and a paragraph.

ZONE limit operator, is quite similar to field limit operator, but restricts matching to a given in-field zone or a list of zones. Note that the subsequent subexpressions are not required to match in a single contiguous span of a given zone, and may match in multiple spans. For instance, (ZONE:th hello world) query will match this example document:

<th>Table 1. Local awareness of Hello Kitty brand.</th>
.. some table data goes here ..
<th>Table 2. World-wide brand awareness.</th>