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Verity's powerful, full-text search features allow you to search with great accuracy. You can search over the entire content text of documents as well as all attributes.

There are many ways to ask a question, or search query. The simplest way is to use the search form fields set up for the different kinds of attributes. You can use one or more words and phrases separated by commas. For full-text attributes, you can also use the Verity query language to apply logic to search terms. The information below tells you about some of the ways you can ask questions.

Full-Text Attributes

More complex search terms using Verity query language operators and modifiers can be constructed for attributes with text stream values. Currently there are three such attributes: description, summary (or abstract), and document content. Verity query language is available only on the full-text attributes. A search term which uses it must not include other types of attributes.

Searching for Words and Phrases

For the full-text attributes, if you enter words and phrases separated by commas, it means, the more of these the better. By default, words and phrases in the query are stemmed, meaning the search is broadened to include the stemmed variations of these words. The score assigned to a document is based on the number of word matches the document contains and the density of those matches.

The query below will search for the phrase "desktop publisher" and stemmed variations of the word "editor":

desktop publisher, editor

Also, you may want to search for the word "editor" alone and not the word along with all of its stemmed variations. To do this, you just delimit the search term in double-quotation marks. For example, the following query will search for the word "HTML" and the word "editor":

"HTML", "editor"

Note that searches are not case-sensitive by default. This means you can use "HTML" or "html" in the above examples and get the same search results.

Using Verity Query Language

You can use operators and modifiers to apply logic to your query and pinpoint the exact information you are interested in. Popular operators are: AND, OR, and NEAR. A modifier can be used with an operator to further define your question for the search engine. Frequently-used modifiers are: MANY and NOT. By default, the words "and," "or," and "not" are interpreted as Verity query language; all other query language elements, such as the NEAR operator, are interpreted as words unless surrounded by angle brackets, e.g. <NEAR>. Sample query expressions using query language are below.

The AND operator selects documents that contain all of the search elements you specify. To find documents that contain both evidence of the word "HTML" and at least one stemmed variation of the word "editor," you can use the following query:

HTML and editor

The OR operator selects documents that show evidence of at least one of the search elements. To find documents that contain either evidence of the word "HTML" or at least one stemmed variation of the word "editor," you can use the following query:

HTML or editor

Proximity Search Methods

There are several search methods for doing proximity searches. A proximity search looks for documents containing search terms within close proximity of each other. The following operators enable proximity search methods: NEAR, PHRASE, SENTENCE, PARAGRAPH. NOTE: Because of the prefiltering of document content done in DocuShare, the SENTENCE and PARAGRAPH operators may not work correctly in all cases.

The NEAR operator selects documents containing specified search terms within close proximity to each other. Document scores are calculated based on the relative number of words between search terms; the closer the search terms, the higher the score. To find documents that contain the word "HTML" and stemmed variations of the word "publishing" within close proximity to each other, you can use this query:

"HTML"<NEAR>publishing

The SENTENCE and PARAGRAPH operators are used to specify a search within a sentence or paragraph. The syntax for using these operators is similar. To find documents that contain the word "HTML" and stemmed variations of the word "publishing" within the same paragraph, you can use this query:

"HTML"<PARAGRAPH>publishing
Excluding Information

Want to exclude something from a search? That's what the NOT modifier does. For example, to find documents containing stemmed variations of the words "server" and "configuration" in close proximity to each other, but not stemmed variations of the word "firewall", you enter this query:

server<NEAR>configuration<AND> <NOT>firewall
Wildcard Characters A Wildcard Character can not be used as a replacement for any Special Characters (see below).

Special Characters

The following characters have special meaning to the Verity search engine and will not be treated as literals in a query string: