Basic Search Principles

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Basic Search Principles and Rules

For simple searches, it is easiest to type a few words conforming to the principles and rules listed below:

Spaces (AND operator). When you separate multiple words with spaces, the spaces are interpreted as an AND operator as explained below. In other words, entering New York City has the same effect as entering New AND York AND City.

AND operator. When you enter words separated by the word "AND," a document will only be found if all of the words you specified are contained somewhere in its index entry. For example, if you enter New AND York AND City as your search criteria, you will find "New York City Subways," "City Subways of New York," and "City of York's New Plaza." (For clarity, some people make a habit of enclosing the AND operator with angle brackets like this: New <AND> York <AND> City.)

Commas, (AND operator). When you enter words separated by commas (or commas plus spaces), a document will only be found if all of the words you specified are contained somewhere in its index entry. (In technical terms, commas are treated as Boolean AND operators.)

Search phrases (quotation marks). When you enclose multiple words between quotation marks, you create a search phrase. A document will only be found if all of those words in that exact sequence are contained somewhere in its index entry. For example, if you enter the phrase "New York City" as your search criteria, you will find "New York City Subways," but not "City Subways of New York."

Exact searches. Anything enclosed in double-quote marks is searched for exactly as-is. For example, if you enter "Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe" as your search criteria, only documents that have that exact string of letters and punctuation somewhere in their index entries will be listed. In other words, the commas and the word and are treated as elements to search for rather than as operators.

Boolean operators. In technical terminology, iPlanet Compass Server uses standard Boolean operators such as <and>, <or>, <not>, and so forth.

Partial words. You can search for combinations of letters, numbers, and common characters regardless of whether or not they form a full, correctly spelled word.

Reserved words. When entered in the search box, the words:

and
or
not

are treated as special reserved words that iPlanet Compass Server interprets as operators that tell it how it should conduct the search rather than words to be searched for. This is true no matter how they are capitalized, not, Not, and NOT are all treated the same. If you want to include one of these reserved words in your search you must enclose the phrase in double-quote marks. For example, the criteria "truth or consequences" treats the word or as part of the phrase you are searching for rather than instructing the server to search for either the word truth or the word consequences.

Reserved characters. When entered in the search box, the characters:

< > " ( ) are treated as special reserved characters that iPlanet Compass Server interprets as instructions about how it should conduct the search rather than words to be searched for. See Search Syntax for information on how to use these reserved characters. If you want to search for these characters, you must enclose them in double-quote marks as part of a phrase.

Capitalization. Capitalization does not count in a search unless you use mixed case. You can enter all Upper or lower case letters in the search box and iPlanet Compass Server will find all documents matching your criteria regardless of whether or not the letters in the document are capitalized. If there is any mixed case, the only matches returned will be those with the same case. (If you want a case-sensitive search of all upper or lower case, use the <case> operator as explained in Search Syntax.

Dates. The following principles apply when searching by date (before, after, etc.):

Full dates only. You must use full dates. Partial dates like "6/97" are not allowed.
Days and years. You must use numbers for the day and year.
Months. You can use numbers or words for the month. When using words for the month, you can use the common abreviations. For example,

9
September
sept
sep

Separators. You can use standard numerical date punctuation such as 1/15/97, 1-15-97, and 1.15.97.
Element order. Numerical dates must be entered in month-day-year order. For example, 1-9-97 represents January 9th.
Day-month-year order. To use dates in day-month-year order, you must spell out (or abreviate) the month. For example, 1 sep 97 for September 1st.