TechPlanet Search Help

Term Modifiers | Wildcard Searches | Fuzzy Searches | Proximity Searches | Boosting a Term | Boolean Operators | Required term | Excluded term | Grouping | Escaping Special Characters

The TechPlanet offline search search provides a rich query language that you can use for creating search queries.

Most of the time, however, just entering a text string will suffice!

A query is broken up into terms and operators. There are two types of terms: Single Terms and Phrases.

A Single Term is a single word such as test or hello.

A Phrase is a group of words surrounded by double quotes such as "hello dolly".

Multiple terms can be combined together with Boolean operators to form a more complex query.

Note: TechPlanet offline search may not work on all browsers it has been tested on Firefox and Internet Explorer 6. There is a separate search index for each DVD. This means that the search will only return hits for content on the DVD you are currently browsing.

Term Modifiers

TechPlanet offline search supports modifying query terms to provide a wide range of searching options.

Wildcard Searches

TechPlanet offline search supports single and multiple character wildcard searches.

To perform a single character wildcard search use the ? symbol.

To perform a multiple character wildcard search use the * symbol.

The single character wildcard search looks for terms that match that with the single character replaced. For example, to search for "text" or "test" you can use the search:

Multiple character wildcard searches looks for 0 or more characters. For example, to search for Windows , Win95 or WindowsNT you can use the search:

You can also use the wildcard searches in the middle of a term. For example, to search for Win95 or Windows95 you can use the search

Note: You cannot use a * or ? symbol as the first character of a search.

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Fuzzy Searches

TechPlanet offline search supports fuzzy searches. To do a fuzzy search use the tilde( ~ ) symbol at the end of a Single word Term. For example to search for a term similar in spelling to "roam" use the fuzzy search:

This search will find terms like embedding and imbedding

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Proximity Searches

TechPlanet offline search supports finding words are a within a specific distance away. To do a proximity search use the tilde( ~ ) symbol at the end of a Phrase. For example to search for "Prinergy" and "insite" within 10 words of each other in a document use the search:

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Boosting a Term

TechPlanet offline search provides the relevance level of matching documents based on the terms found. To boost a term (that is, make it more relevant) use the caret(^) symbol with a boost factor (a number) at the end of the term you are searching. The higher the boost factor, the more relevant the term will be.

Boosting allows you to control the relevance of a document by boosting its term. For example, if you are searching for

and you want the term "Prinergy" to be more relevant boost it using the ^ symbol along with the boost factor next to the term. You would type:

This will make documents with the term Prinergy appear more relevant. You can also boost Phrase Terms as in the example:

By default, the boost factor is 1. Although, the boost factor must be positive, it can be less than 1 (that is,.2)

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Boolean Operators

Boolean operators allow terms to be combined through logic operators. TechPlanet offline search supports AND, OR, and NOT as Boolean operators.

Note: Boolean operators must be ALL CAPS.

OR

The OR operator is the default conjunction operator. This means that if there is no Boolean operator between two terms, the OR operator is used. The OR operator links two terms and finds a matching document if either of the terms exist in a document. This is equivalent to a union using sets. The symbol || can be used in place of the word OR.

To search for documents that contain either "Prinergy Evo" or just "Evo" use the query:

or

AND

The AND operator matches documents where both terms exist anywhere in the text of a single document. This is equivalent to an intersection using sets. The symbol && can be used in place of the word AND.

To search for documents that contain "Prinergy Evo" and "issue tracking" use the query:

NOT

The NOT operator excludes documents that contain the term after NOT. The symbol ! can be used in place of the word NOT.

To search for documents that contain "Prinergy EVO" but not "japan" use the query:

Note: The NOT operator cannot be used with just one term. For example, the following search will return no results:

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Required term: +

The + or required operator requires that the term after the + symbol exist somewhere in a the field of a single document.

To search for documents that must contain "insite" and may contain "Prinergy" use the query:

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Excluded term: -

The - (or prohibit) operator excludes documents that contain the term after the - symbol.

To search for documents that contain "Prinergy Evo" but not "japan" use the query:

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Grouping

TechPlanet offline search supports using parentheses to group clauses to form sub queries. This can be very useful if you want to control the boolean logic for a query.

To search for either "Prinergy" or "insite" and "bugs" use the query:

This eliminates any confusion and makes sure you that bugs must exist and either term Prinergy or insite may exist.

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Escaping Special Characters

TechPlanet offline search supports escaping special characters that are part of the query syntax. The current list special characters are

To escape these character use the \ before the character. For example to search for (1+1):2 use the query:

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