This section describes the expected behavior of supported search syntax. It includes the following topics:

• Operator Modes
• Precedence and Parentheses
• Punctuation
• Case Sensitivity
• Stemming
• Wildcards
• Quoted Phrases
• Examples

Operator Modes

The Search Service parses queries to determine which of the following operator modes to use for the query:

Bag of Words mode:
If the query does not include any search operators (+/-, AND, OR, NEAR, etc.), the Search Service parses the query in Bag of Words mode. Each word in the query must be present in all of the search results; the Boolean AND operator is implicit.

Query Operators mode:
If the query includes query operators, the Search Service parses the query in Query Operators mode. Query operators AND, OR, NOT, and NEAR are spotted without any special marking (for example, cat AND dog), but all other operators must be surrounded by angle brackets (for example, ) to be recognized as having special meaning. A query that contains three or more terms and an operator is parsed as if the terms on each side of the operator were quoted phrases. For example:

Search Service and Notification :
This query is parsed as: "Search Service" AND Notification Search operators are localized for the following European languages:


Internet Style mode:
If the query includes operators common to internet search engines such as AltaVista and Google, the Search Service parses the search in Internet Style mode. All terms preceded by a plus (+) are required. All terms preceded by a minus (-) are excluded. If at least one term is preceded by a +, then any "plain" terms not preceded by a + or - are used to boost ranking of results, but are not required. For example, consider the following query: +dog -cat bird

This query returns documents that contain dog but do not contain cat, and ranks documents with both dog and bird highest. Compare this to a similar query: bird -cat . This query returns documents that contain bird but do not contain cat. Absent any + terms, the plain term bird is treated as a required term. The following table summarizes the behavior of operators.

Operator	Meaning	Alternate
<and>	Boolean operator that connects terms that must both match the items returned.	AND, '&' (ampersand)
<or>	Boolean operator that connects terms in which either can match the items returned.	OR, ACCRUE, ANY, '|' (vertical bar), ',' (comma)
<not>	Items must not match the term.	NOT, AND NOT
<near>	Terms must occur within N words of each other, regardless of order.	NEAR, <near>
<order>	First term must precede the second term.
<word>	Turns off stemming or alternate case, requiring exact spelling.
<phrase>	Terms must appear as sequential terms in a phrase.	Surround terms in "" (double quotes)
<sentence>	Same as <near>
<paragraph>	Same as <near>
+ (plus)	Term must appear in the items returned.
- (minus)	Term must not appear in the items returned.
* (asterisk)	The wildcard specifies that the result must match 0 or more characters at the beginning or end of a word.

There are certain circumstances in which a user can unintentionally invoke a more advanced search mode by inadvertently using operators. Examples include the following quieries:

Query	Equivalent to...
The young and the restless	"the young" "the restless"
File not found	to file found
Error -217439239	to Error 217439239

In each of these examples, enclosing the query in double quotes yields the desired effect. Back to Top

Precedence and Parentheses

The Internet Style mode operators '+' and '-' take precedence over the other search operators. For example, +big dog cat matches all documents that contain the term big, boosting the ranking of any documents that contain any of the three terms dog, or cat.

Within query operators mode, the operators have the following precedence classes, from greatest to least:

Parentheses can be used to override operator precedence. The following two queries are equivalent (the parentheses do not effect the semantics of the search).
This search matches documents that meet one of two conditions:

On the other hand, the parentheses in the following query override the default operator precedence:
This search matches documents containing the terms a and b and either c or d, where b is in close proximity to c or d. Back to Top

Punctuation

Punctuation is treated specially. The following rules describe the interpretation of punctuation characters.

Quotation marks are always interpreted as operators signifying a quoted phrase. It is therefore impossible to search for a quotation mark (there is no escape character, such as a backslash, which would remove the special significance of the quotation marks).

All other punctuation loses any special operator significance inside of quotation marks. (The same holds for all operators, such as AND.)

Outside of quotation marks, punctuation either has significance as an operator, or it is ignored. The following punctuation has special operator significance outside of quotation marks:

• Left and right angle brackets(<>) enclose operators, as in
• Comma (,) is treated as OR
• Ampersand (&) is treated as AND
• Vertical bar (|) is treated as OR
• Plus (+) and minus (-) are interpreted as Internet Style syntax
• Asterisk (*) is interpreted as a wildcard character

Punctuation is always split apart from adjoining alpha-numeric characters. For example, an advanced search for bag-of-words matches documents containing the three tokens bag, of, and words.

Underscore is treated as punctuation. This means you must enclose a term containing an underscore in quotes to get an exact match (for example, "HOST_NAME" matches HOST_NAME, but without the quotes, it also matches HOST NAME).

Symmetrical punctuation tokenization takes place on text stored in the index, so the explosion of a query term such as bag-of-words does not prevent the search from matching a document containing the phrase bag-of-words.

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Case Sensitivity

All searches are case-insensitive, except when the operator is used.

Query	Matches
BEA	Items containing BEA, bea, or any other case variant.
"Search Service"	Items containing the phrase Search Service or any other case variant.
BEA	Items containing BEA, but not bea or Bea.

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Stemming

Word stemming is applied to all individual terms in the search query, except within quoted phrases, or when the operator is used. The stemming of query terms means that a query term will match documents containing morphological variants of that term. For example, a search for dogs AND go would match a document containing the terms dog and went. (This example applies to English; stemming employs language-specific information and depends on the user's locale and the language used to index the document.)

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Wildcards

The wildcard operator is used to search for prefixes, suffixes, and substrings of indexed terms. Wildcards cannot be used within quoted phrases.

Search Type	Matches
prefix	cat*	Finds all documents containing terms that start with cat, such as caterpillar.
suffix	*cat	Finds all documents with terms that end in cat, such as tomcat.
substring	*cat*	Finds all documents with terms that contain cat, such as tomcats. Mid-string wildcard expressions must contain at least three characters (for example, *abc* is legal but *bc* is not).

Terms generated by wildcard expansion are not stemmed.

Wildcard expansion is performed internally by replacing each pattern with a limited list of terms that match the pattern before actually executing the query. Very broad wildcard expressions might therefore return a partial list of results.

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Quoted Phrases

A quoted phrase in the user search query matches only documents that contain the given sequence of terms. For instance, a search for "big dog" will not match a document that contains the terms big and dog if it does not contain the phrase big dog. Stemming is not applied to terms within a quoted phrase. Also, wildcards cannot be used within quoted phrases.

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Examples

The descriptions of searches below do not include any of the query expansion or ranking techniques that are employed in basic search. Except where otherwise noted, all matches are case-insensitive.

Search Type	Expected Behaviour
Dog	Searches for documents containing any stem variant of Dog.
	Dog Searches for documents containing Dog as specified exactly with no stemming or lowercasing. This is the only case-sensitive form of search.
Big <phrase>Dog	Searches for documents containing the exact phrase big dog without stemming.
"Big Dog"	Same as Big <phrase> Dog.
cat AND dog	Searches for documents containing stem variants of cat and dog. Equivalent to cat <and> dog.
cat <all> dog	Same as cat AND dog.
cat OR dog	Searches for documents containing stem variants of cat or dog.
cat, dog	Same as cat OR dog.
cat <any> dog	Same as cat OR dog.
cat <accrue> dog	Same as cat OR dog.
cat NOT dog	Searches for documents containing stem variants of cat but not containing stem variants of dog.
cat AND NOT dog	Same as cat NOT dog
cat NEAR dog	Finds stem variants of cat occurring near dog (default is within 25 words).
cat NEAR/15 dog	Finds stem variants of cat within 15 words of dog.
cat <order> <near> dog	Finds stem variants of cat within 15 words before dog. Can also use more convenient syntax cat <order> <near>dog.
cat dog	Finds stem variants of cat anywhere before dog.
cat dog	Finds stem variants of cat within 10 words of dog.
cat dog	Finds stem variants of cat within 50 words of dog.
cat dog	Finds stem variants of cat and dog. The unsupported operator XYZ is ignored.
cat*	Finds all documents containing terms that start with cat, such as caterpillar.
*cat	Finds all documents with terms that end in cat such as tomcat.
*cat*	Finds all documents with terms that contain cat such as tomcats. Mid-string wildcard expressions must contain at least three characters (for example, *abc* is legal but *bc* is not).
dog *	Finds documents containing stem variants of dog. The singleton wildcard is treated as stray punctuation.
dog cat bird	Finds documents containing stem variants of all three terms, dog, cat, and bird. (Bag of Words mode)
big dog AND bird	Finds documents containing the phrase big dog, and stem variants of the term bird. (Query Operators mode with implicit phrase construction)
dog cat +bird	Finds documents containing stem variants of bird. The rank is boosted for documents containing stem variants of dog or cat. The words dog and cat are not joined into a phrase in Internet Style mode.
+dog -cat bird	Finds documents that contain stem variants of dog but do not contain stem variants of cat, and ranks documents with both dog and bird highest.
bird -cat	Finds documents that contain stem variants of bird but do not contain stem variants of cat.
bag-of-words	Searches for documents containing stem variants of the three terms: bag, of, and words. Punctuation marks are treated as spaces when quotation marks are not present.
"Mr. Jones"	Searches for the phrase mr. jones. Punctuation marks are considered part of the search string if they are included within quoted phrases.

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