This document increases in complexity and the first few paragraphs will be sufficient for most users.

Simple query expressions

Enter a word or a group of words to search for stories containing those words. A comma delimited list of words will be treated as a logical OR statement, for example 'results,scorecard' will be treated as 'results OR scorecard'. If you ommit the commas the words will be treated as a phrase, therefore you would search for 'results scorecard'. Case is ignored.

Use a wild card to broaden your search, for example 'all' will just find stories with the word 'all' in them whereas 'all*' will find 'allegorical', 'alliterate' etc. as well as 'all'.

Operators are normally surrounded by angle brackets < >. However, you can use the AND, OR, and NOT operators in a query without using angle brackets: 'software AND (Microsoft OR Oracle)'. To include an operator in a search, you surround it with double quotation marks: software "and" Microsoft. This expression searches for the phrase "software and Microsoft."

By default the query employs the STEM operator and the MANY modifier. STEM searches for words that derive from those entered in the query expression, so that entering "find" will return documents that contain "find," "finding," "finds," etc. The MANY modifier forces the documents returned in the search to be presented in a list based on a relevancy score (first column in the results table).

Operators

An operator represents logic to be applied to a search element. This logic defines the qualifications a document must meet to be retrieved. Operator types are as follows:

• Wildcards
• Evidence operators
• Proximity operators
• Relational operators
• Concept operators
• Score operators

Ordinarily, you use operators in explicit searches. They are used in the following manner:

"<operator>search_string"

Wildcards

The following wildcard characters are available for searching Verity collections:

Searching for wildcards as literals

To search for a wildcard character in your collection, you need to escape the character with a backslash (\). For example:

To match a literal asterisk, you precede the * with two backslashes: "a\\*"

To match a question mark or other wildcard character: "Checkers\?"

Searching for special characters as literals

The following non-alphanumeric characters must be preceded by a backslash character (\) in a search string:

• comma (,)
• left and right parentheses ( )
• Double quotation mark (")
• backslash (\)
• at sign (@)
• left curly brace ({)
• left bracket ([)
• less than sign (<)
• backquote (`)

In addition to the backslash character, you can use paired backquotes (` `) to interpret special characters as literals. For example, to search for the wildcard string "a{b" you can surround the string with backquotes, as follows:

`a{b`

To search for a wildcard string that includes the literal backquote character (`) you must use two backquotes together and surround the whole string in backquotes:

`*n``t`

Note that you can use either paired backquotes or backslashes to escape special characters. There is no functional difference in the use of one or the other. For example, you can query for the term: <DDA> in the following ways:

\<DDA\> or `<DDA>`

Proximity operators

Proximity operators specify the relative location of specific words in the document. Specified words must be in the same phrase, paragraph, or sentence for a document to be retrieved. In the case of NEAR and NEAR/N operators, retrieved documents are ranked by relevance based on the proximity of the specified words. Proximity operators can be nested; phrases or words can appear within SENTENCE or PARAGRAPH operators, and SENTENCE operators can appear within PARAGRAPH operators.

The following table describes each operator:

commute <NEAR/10> bicycle <NEAR/10>
train <NEAR/10>

mission oak
"mission oak"
mission <PHRASE> oak
<PARAGRAPH> (mission, oak)

jazz <SENTENCE> musician
<SENTENCE> (jazz, musician)

Relational operators

Relational operators search document fields that have been defined in the collection. Documents containing specified field values are returned. Documents retrieved using relational operators are not ranked by relevance, and you cannot use the MANY modifier with relational operators.

There are two types of relational operators to perform numeric and date comparisons. Text comparison operators match words and parts of words.

Numeric and date relational operators

The following operators are used for numeric and date comparisons.

Text comparison operators

The following operators are used for text comparisons.