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Search Help
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Search Help |
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Consecutive words are treated as a phrase; they must appear in the same order within a matching document. |
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Queries are case-insensitive, so you can type your query in uppercase or lowercase. |
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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. |
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Words in the exception list are treated as placeholders in phrase and proximity queries. For example, if you searched for “Word for Windows”, the results could give you “Word for Windows” and “Word and Windows”, because for is a noise word and appears in the exception list. |
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Punctuation marks such as the period (.), colon (:), semicolon (;), and comma (,) are ignored during a search. |
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To use specially treated characters such as &, |, ^, #, @, $, (, ), in a query, enclose your query in quotation marks (“). |
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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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You can insert boolean operators (AND, OR, and NOT) and the proximity operator (NEAR) to specify additional search information. |
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The wildcard character (*) can match words with a given prefix. The query esc* matches the terms “ESC,” “escape,” and so on. |
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Boolean and Proximity Operators
Boolean and proximity operators can create a more precise query.
| Boolean & Proximity | ||
| To Search For: | Example | Results |
| Both terms in the same page | access and basic
OR access & basic |
Pages with both the words “access” and “basic” |
| Either term in a page | cgi or isapi OR cgi | isapi |
Pages with the words “cgi” or “isapi” |
| The first term without the second term | access and not
basic OR access & ! basic |
Pages with the word “access” but not “basic” |
| Pages not matching a property value | not @size = 100 OR ! @size = 100 |
Pages that are not 100 bytes |
| Both terms in the same page, close together | excel near project OR excel ~ project |
Pages with the word “excel” near the word “project” |
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You can add parentheses to nest expressions within a query. The expressions in parentheses are evaluated before the rest of the query. |
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Use double quotes (“) to indicate
that a Boolean or NEAR operator keyword should be ignored
in your query. |
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The NEAR operator is similar to the AND
operator in that NEAR returns a match if both words being searched
for are in the same page. However, the NEAR operator differs
from AND because the rank assigned by NEAR depends on
the proximity of words. That is, the rank of a page with the searched-for words closer together is greater than or equal to the rank of a page where the words are farther apart. If the searched-for words are more than 50 words apart, they are not considered near enough, and the page is assigned a rank of zero. |
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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. |
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The AND operator has a higher precedence
than OR.
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Wildcard operators help you find pages containing words similar to a given word.
| Wildcards | ||
| To Search For: | Example | Results |
| Words with the same prefix | comput* | Pages with words that have the prefix “comput,” such as “computer,” “computing,” and so on |
| Words based on the same stem word | fly** | Pages with words based on the same stem as “fly,” such as “flying,” “flown,” “flew,” and so on |
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