As you get used to writing simple queries, you may want to ask your question in a way that leads the search engine to apply logic to the terms included in your query.
You can do additional types of searches, depending on the types of collections you are searching. For example, you can do zone searching if you have collections of HTML documents, and field searching if your collection has been defined to include fields, such as the document's date, title, and author.
Proximity Searching
You can focus the search more closely by telling the search engine to retrieve documents that contain the search terms in close proximity to each other: that is, near each other, in the same sentence, or in the same paragraph. The operators used for proximity searching are NEAR, SENTENCE, and PARAGRAPH.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 of each other, use this query:
SENTENCE and PARAGRAPH operators are used to specify a search within a sentence and 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, use this query:
AND, OR, and NOT must be surrounded by left and right angle brackets (< >). By default, AND, OR, and NOT are interpreted as query language; all other query language elements are interpreted as words unless they are surrounded by angle brackets. Some examples in this guide show AND, OR, and NOT with angle brackets, and some without. You can enter expressions either way. Both of the following examples mean: Look for documents that contain the word "future" and the word "trends:"
- future <AND> trends
You can search over an HTML zone if you have collections of HTML documents. To specify a query expression for a zone search, you need to give a zone name. A zone name corresponds to the HTML tag name. The zone name is combined with a query and the
IN operator in the query expression. For example, this query will find documents whose titles have stemmed variations of the word "web" in them:
Typically, users combine field searches with full text searches. For example, if you were interested in finding a particular memo written on June 18, 1996 on the subject of a project named "Picasso," you could use the following query expression to search document text for the word "Picasso" and the date field for June 18, 1996:
In Information Server, the following fields can be searched:
In addition, some documents contain the following fields: