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.