Text Search

In the second section of Search Criteria you can use text to narrow your searches and return more specific results. By defining text criteria in the Find items with the following terms: field, you can:

Surrounding a name or phrase with double quotation marks (") returns search results that contain that exact phrase in the order that the words are displayed in the query.

If you want to see documents with the phrase credit card fraud 2012 and you do not want matches for fraud that was committed in 2011 or earlier, enclose the query inside double quotation marks.

Term variants, such as credit cards and credit card frauds, are not considered matches for exact match search.

The query "credit card fraud 2012" does not match credit card frauds 2012. Also, no other terms can appear between any two terms in the phrase, so credit card online fraud 2012 does not match.

The search is not case-sensitive, so it matches Credit Card Fraud 2012. Also, punctuation is ignored, so credit card, fraud 2012 matches.

Table 1. Examples of exact match search
Find	Sample query in the search box
The phrase Justice Department without related phrases.	"Justice Department"
All of the information for a 2011 company annual report for a specific year and not the reports for previous years.	"2011" annual report

Wildcard characters, such as an asterisk (*) or question mark (?), are useful when you are not sure of the spelling, exact name, or variations of a term. Use the asterisk (*) to match none or multiple characters, but only one term. Use the question mark (?) for a single character.

The query czech* returns documents with the terms czech, czechoslovakia, czechoslovakian, and other words that start with the characters czech, including the word czech without any following characters.

You can also use the wildcard characters in a phrase search. For example, the query John * Kennedy returns documents with the terms John Fitzgerald Kennedy and John F Kennedy.

An asterisk (*) wildcard character behaves differently on different repositories. In ECS, an asterisk (*) matches any number of characters, including no characters, within a single term. It does not match across a word separator (two or more terms), and it must include a term with at least at least one character to match. For example, Jo*dy does not match John Kennedy (two terms).

The query term fin*int matches fingerprint but not fine print.

The search term ra?or matches razor or rasor, but not raptor. Multiple question marks in a row stand for the same number of characters as there are question marks. For example, psych????y matches either psychology or psychiatry but not psychotherapy.

Adding a wildcard character to the beginning of a query (for example, *zech) might cause the search engine to take longer to return results. The search engine musts search every character of each potential match at least until it finds zech.

For a more efficient search, place the asterisk after czech* to limit the size of information to search. The search engine can eliminate all results that do not start with c and then eliminate all results whose second character is not z.

Table 2. Examples of wildcard search
Find	Sample query in the search box
Information about the judicial court system, such as court documentation, court dockets, or docking court hours.	doc court.*
All reports that are generated by the legal defense departments in both America and Canada. The file names for the reports include the word defense or defence and you remember that the word is spelled differently in both countries.	legal defen?e.
The name Mikhail Gorbachev.	Mil Gorbachev*

To further narrow your search, you can restrict the search results to terms that appear within a range of words. Terms that are close to each other are more likely to be related than terms that are far apart in a document.

Table 3. Examples of proximity search
Find	Sample query in the search box
You are reviewing statistics for the crime rates that involve certain vehicles in a specific part of a city. You want to find insurance claims that include information about crimes that involve minivans and are handled by specific police precincts.	north police reports minivans car jacking Enter 15 words for the proximity search so that you get fewer results that are a closer match.
You are gathering research for possible side effects that occurred in diabetes drug trials in the United States and Canada. Your first task is to locate medical records for patients in North America and who are in drug trials for diabetes within a range of words.	North America diabetes drug trials Enter 1000 words for the proximity search so that you get a wider range of results.

Use the minus sign (-) to exclude items that contain certain terms. The minus sign (-) applies to a term and its variants.

Table 4. Examples of excluding terms
Find	Sample query in the search box
Documents about the philosopher Calvin and not the cartoon character Calvin.	Calvin -Hobbes.
Documents and images about the original Star Trek series and not about Voyager and Star Trek: The Next Generation.	Star Trek -Voyager -"Next Generation".

To use the minus sign (-) before your search terms, click Text options > Advanced operators.

Use the plus sign (+) to find the items that contain all of the terms that you enter and not just some of them.

Placing the plus sign (+) at the front of a term ensures that both terms are included in the search results.

Requiring terms is slightly different from an exact match. The exact match is typically used to find phrases where the terms are in a specific order. Requiring terms does not require multiple terms to be in a specific order.

Table 5. Examples of requiring terms in search results
Find	Sample query in the search box
Only documents that mention landing failures on Mars.	Mars +landings +failures
Insurance claims for house fires in specific cities in Washington.	house fires +claims +Seattle +Vancouver

ECS sorts search results by using the Name property. When you do a text search sorting by the Name property, it takes longer to return a result set than if the search is configured to sort by the Rank property.

If a text search takes too long to run or times out, modify the search criteria so that the search results are sorted by using the Rank property.

You can use search operators to help define your search. The search operators are based on properties that are commonly used when searching for items. The operators are shortcuts to commonly selected criteria, such as ownership (for example, added by me) or modification date (for example, modified in the last month).

To scope text search criteria to the selected properties, use the Contains operator to search for any word or phrase within a particular property. The operator is available if the property that you select is enabled for content-based retrieval (CBR).

You can combine a text search with property searches when you define text search criteria by using the main text search query box or the Contains operator. Conditions that use the Contains operator are separate from property search, so the match all or any property option applies only to conditions that use operators other than the Contains operator.

When you open a saved search, any conditions that use the Contains operator will appear first in the list of property search conditions.