Generally, queries should work as they do in Google with many of the same query parameters supported (if sometimes less completely). Query parameters include: date, site, url, and type. See Query Fields for a more complete list.
Like Google, queries AND terms together so the query Pope Rome
will search for all documents with Pope AND Rome only.
To search for all documents that do not include a term, prefix the term
with a minus (or a 'NOT'). For example the query Pope -Rome will return
search results for documents that include the term Pope but NOT the
term Rome.
Dates are always GMT and specified using 14 digits in the form
yyyymmddHHMMSS where yyyy is a 4 digit year,
mm is a two
digit month (zero-pad if month is single-digit), dd is
date, HH is two-digit hour, MM is
two-digit minute, and SS is two-digit seconds.
You cannot search by date alone. You must also supply a term as
part of your query. For example: date:20051204000000 pope
will return documents that include the term pope and that were
archived on the 4th of December, 2005 (at midnight).
To specify date ranges, pass two dates separated by a hyphen to the date
field. For example, the query
date:20041204000000-20051204000000 pope will return documents that contain the term "pope" that were
archived between December 4th 2004 and the same day in 2005.
To reorder the search results by date rather than relevance you need to
add the following to the end of the search query in your browser
location: &sort=date (Later we'll add an advanced search
page to preclude need of direct URL manipulation). For example, a search
using the term katrina will result generally in an entry in
the location bar of
the browser looking like this: http://websearch.archive.org/collections/katrina/search.jsp?query=katrina.
Append &sort=date to sort the results by date: E.g. http://websearch.archive.org/collections/katrina/search.jsp?query=katrina&sort=date.
To sort by descending date order, append &reverse=true:
E.g. http://websearch.archive.org/collections/katrina/search.jsp?query=katrina&sort=date&reverse=true.
Look for pdfs by adding url:pdf to your query or type:pdf.
See the Querying section on the NutchWAX FAQ page as well as the Nutch FAQ.