More About Search
This section contains more detailed information about how searches are performed.
Ignored characters
The following special characters in a search string are ignored (or to be precise, they are removed from the search string and replaced by space characters):
% ^ " / \ : ; ( ) + ? ! { } [ ] ~ | -
In other words, if you enter the search string
Test%Search\String
it will be converted to
Test Search String
before it is submitted to the
search engine.
Wild cards added
Once any special characters have been removed, wild cards are added to each word in the resulting search string as follows:
Test Search String => (Test Search String) OR ((Test OR Test*) (Search OR Search*) (String OR String*))
This means it will find not only occurrences of the specified words, but also occurrences of longer words that start with the same character sequence ("Tested searching strings", for example).
How filters are combined
Multiple filters of the same type are combined
with an OR
operator, so that items matching
any of the specified criteria will be found.
Adding more filters of the same type therefore potentially
increases the number of results. Specifying the
Document Types filters Story
and Picture, for example, will return both
stories and pictures, whereas if you specify only
Story then only stories will be returned.
Multiple filters of different types are combined with an
AND
operator, so that only items matching
all of the specified criteria will be found.
Adding more filters of the same type therefore potentially
decreases the number of results. Specifying just
the Document Types filter
Story, for example, will return all all stories,
whereas specifying both the Document Types filter
Story and the Authors filter
Alice will only return those stories that have
Alice as an author. Specifying the Document Types
filters Story and Picture
and the Authors filters
Alice and Bob will return
both stories and pictures that have either Alice or Bob (or both)
among their authors.