Search Language Help

Using the query page, you can do a full-text search for a word or phrase on a Web site. Searches produce a list of files that contain the word or phrase anywhere in their text.

The rules for formulating queries are as follows:

• Multiple consecutive words are treated as a phrase; they must appear in the same order within a matching document.
• Queries are case-insensitive, so you can type your query in uppercase or lowercase.
• You can search for any word except for those in the exception list (for English, this includes a, an, and, as, and other common words), which are ignored during a search.
• Words in the exception list are treated as placeholders in phrase and proximity queries.
• Punctuation marks such as the period (.), colon (:), semicolon (;), and comma (,) are ignored during a search.
• To use specially treated characters such as &, |, ^, #, @, $, (, ), in a query, enclose your query in quotation marks (").
• You can use Boolean operators (and, or, not) and the proximity operator (near) to specify additional search information.
• The wildcard character (*) can be used to match words with a given prefix. The query esc* matches the terms “ESC,” “escape,” and so on.
• Free-text queries can be specified without regard to query syntax.
• Vector space queries can be specified.

Boolean and Proximity Operators

Boolean and proximity operators can be used to create a more precise query.

Hints:

• You can use parentheses to nest expressions within a query. The expressions in parentheses are evaluated before the rest of the query.
• Use double quotes (") to indicate that a Boolean or Near operator keyword should be ignored in your query. For example, "Abbot and Costello" will match pages with the phrase, not pages that match the Boolean expression.
• The Near operator returns a match if the words are within 50 words of each other.
• The Not operator can be used only after an And operator in content queries; it can be used only to exclude pages that match a previous content restriction. For property value queries, the Not operator can be used apart from the And operator.

Wildcards

Wildcard operators are useful for finding pages with words similar to a given word.

Free-Text Queries

The query engine finds pages that best match the words and phrases in a free-text query. This is done by automatically finding pages that match the meaning, not the exact wording, of the query. Boolean, proximity, and wildcard operators are ignored within a free-text query. Free-text queries are prefixed with $contents.

Vector Space Queries

The query engine supports vector space queries. Vector queries return pages that match a list of words and phrases. The rank of each page indicates how well the page matched the query.

• Components in vector queries are separated by commas.
• Components in vector queries can be weighted using the [weight] syntax.
• Pages returned by vector queries do not necessarily match every term in the query.
• Vector queries work best when the results are sorted by rank.