searching: more emphasis on man page, fix date range search info

1 files changed, 15 insertions, 17 deletions

diff --git a/searching.mdwn b/searching.mdwn
index 9ff875a..6c2f7c0 100644
--- a/searching.mdwn
+++ b/searching.mdwn
@@ -3,14 +3,16 @@
 What good is an advanced indexing mail client if we don't know how to 
 use it to actually find e-mail?
 
-As notmuch is using Xapian
-[this page](http://xapian.org/docs/queryparser.html) is a good start. 
-However, the description is generic (applies to Xapian in general) and 
-its intended audience seems to be developers wanting to use Xapian in 
-their applications. This page attempts to explain it to users of notmuch (who 
-may not be familiar with Xapian).
-[['notmuch help search-terms'|manpages/notmuch-search-terms-7]] also has a few
-pointers.
+Please see the [[notmuch-search-terms manual
+page|manpages/notmuch-search-terms-7]] first for an overview of the
+search syntax, including the prefixes (such as "to:") and date range
+searches.
+
+Notmuch uses the [Xapian](http://xapian.org/) search engine. The [Xapian
+QueryParser](http://xapian.org/docs/queryparser.html) documentation has
+a generic description of the search language. The intended audience is
+developers wanting to use Xapian in their applications; this page
+attempts to explain it to users of Notmuch.
 
 ## Stemming
 
@@ -165,14 +167,10 @@ Since notmuch is about (large) e-mail collections it is very useful to
 be able to search for e-mails within a specific date range. This will 
 work:
 
-        notmuch search <initial timestamp>..<final-timestamp>
-
-However, until a better syntax is implemented the only form accepted for 
-timestamps is Unix time (seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC), so the 
-utility 'date' can help:
-
-        notmuch search $(date +%s -d 2009-10-01)..$(date +%s)
+        notmuch search date:<since>..<until>
 
-Explanation: '+%s' will tell date to output Unix time format and -d will 
-tell date to output the date from 2009-10-01. See date(1) for more 
+For <since> and <until>, notmuch understands a variety of standard and
+natural ways of expressing dates and times, both in absolute terms
+("2012-10-24") and in relative terms ("yesterday"). Please refer to the
+[[notmuch-search-terms manual page|manpages/notmuch-search-terms-7]] for
 details.