# Recoll user manual
Introduction

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## Full text search

Recoll is a full text search application, which means that it finds your data by content rather than by external attributes (like the file name). You specify words (terms) which should or should not appear in the text you are looking for, and receive in return a list of matching documents, ordered so that the most relevant documents will appear first.

You do not need to remember in what file or email message you stored a given piece of information. You just ask for related terms, and the tool will return a list of documents where these terms are prominent, in a similar way to Internet search engines.

Full text search applications try to determine which documents are most relevant to the search terms you provide. Computer algorithms for determining relevance can be very complex, and in general are inferior to the power of the human mind to rapidly determine relevance. The quality of relevance guessing is probably the most important aspect when evaluating a search application.

In many cases, you are looking for all the forms of a word, including plurals, different tenses for a verb, or terms derived from the same root or stem (example: `floor, floors, floored, flooring...`). Queries are usually automatically expanded to all such related terms (words that reduce to the same stem). This can be prevented for searching for a specific form.

Stemming, by itself, does not accommodate for misspellings or phonetic searches. A full text search application may also support this form of approximation. For example, a search for `aliterattion` returning no result may propose, depending on index contents, `alliteration alteration alterations altercation` as possible replacement terms.

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