Human Query Language for full text search engines. Provides a lenient parser and associated tools for a self-contained and search-engine agnostic query language suitable for use by end users. Lenient in that is will produce a parse tree for any input, given a default operator and by generally ignoring any unparsable syntax. Suitable for use by end users in that it supports potentially several operator variants and a query language not unlike some major web search and other commercial search engines.