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Search Types
Searches can be combined in the following
ways:
- Boolean Operators
Allows the use of AND, NOT and OR
to specify which terms should or should not exist in the search results, i.e.
tutorial AND guru will find those documents that contain
both of the words 'tutorial' and 'guru'.
- Proximity Operator
Using the NEAR operator allows terms to be
found that are within 50 words of each other. This in effect is similar to the
AND operator, i.e. tutorial NEAR guru will find
those documents where the word 'tutorial' is within 50 words of 'guru'.
- Vector Space Queries
Allows a weighted list of words or phrases to be
queried. The rank of each result indicates how well the page matches the query.
The pages returned may not actually meet every term in your query so results
should be sorted by rank. For example the query *pie,
apple[50], cherry[10], pumpkin[400] will return those documents that
contain any words that end 'pie' and will show a preference to 'pumpkin',
'apple' and then 'cherry'.
Basic Rules for Querying Text Columns
Many of the catalog
columns contain text values. The following rules should be followed when
querying text columns:
- Consecutive words are treated as a phrase. This means that they must appear
in the same order within a matching document.
- Queries are not case sensitive, 'JASON' will match 'jason' or 'JaSoN'.
- Any word can be searched for. However noise words such as 'the', 'an' or
single letters and numbers are ignored during a search unless they are part of a
quoted phrase.
- Any words that are defined in the noise word list are treated as
placeholders in phrase and proximity queries. For example, searching for "Word
for Windows" would result in a match for "Word for Windows" and "Word and
Windows" because 'for' is a noise word.
- Punctuation marks, such as the period (.), colon (:), semicolon (;), and
comma (,), are treated as word breaks and are ignored during a search.
- Special characters, such as &, |, ^, #, @, $, (, ), must be enclosed in
quotation marks (").
- To search for a word or phrase containing quotation marks, enclose the
entire phrase in quotation marks, and then double the quotation marks around the
word or words you want to surround with quotes. For example, "World-Wide Web or
""Web"" searches for World-Wide Web or "Web."
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