The text search criteria work in a similar way to SmartEPG. Firstly, enter some text and where to look. Next, assign that text item a value. When all of the texts in a search are matched, if the total value is 50 more, then a match occurs.

Multiple search texts can be combined with specific values to achieve AND, OR and NOT outcomes. For example:

AND Using "Star" +30 and "Trek" +30 will find all programmes with "Star" and "Trek" because 30 + 30 >= 50.
OR Using "Star Trek" +50 and "Star Wars" +50 will find all programmes with "Star Trek" and "Star Wars" because both criteria alone score >= 50.
NOT Using "Star Trek" +50 and "Deep Space Nine" -90 will find all "Star Trek" programmes except for "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" because the resulting score will be < 50.

Wildcard characters can be used to substitute for any character or set of characters, for example:

To match any single character, use the "?" character: "Thunder?irds".
To match any group of characters, (including spaces), use the "*" character: "Thun*irds".

Some characters have special meaning, so they need to be 'escaped' with a backslash "\".

To find "M*A*S*H", look for "M\*A\*S\*H".
To find "[Example]", look for "\[Example\]".
To find "(Example)", look for "\(Example\)".

'regular expressions' can also be used to create search texts, for example:

"Star (Trek|Wars)" will match "Star Trek" and "Star Wars"
"^World" will match "World News" but not "Wayne's World"
"News$" will match "World News" but not "News Week"
"[0-9]" will match any title that contains numerals like "101 Dalmations"

By default, epgsearch automatically converts wildcards into regular expressions. To preserve pure regular expression syntax, encase your regex as follows "/regex-here/".
For an in-depth discussion of regular expressions, refer to these sites:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression
http://www.regular-expressions.info/