Modifier Reference


Modifiers are used in conjunction with operators. When specified, a modifier changes the standard behavior of an operator in some way. For example, you can use the CASE modifier with an operator to specify that the case of the search word you enter be considered a search element as well. Modifiers include CASE, MANY, NOT, and ORDER, each of which is described below.

CASE

Use the CASE modifier with the WORD or WILDCARD operator to perform a case-sensitive search, based on the case of the word or phrase specified.

To use the CASE modifier, you simply enter the search word or phrase as you wish it to appear in retrieved documents - in all uppercase letters, in mixed uppercase and lowercase letters, or in all lowercase letters.

For example, to retrieve documents that contain the word "Apple" in mixed uppercase and lowercase letters, you can enter the following:

<CASE> <WORD> Apple

Only those documents that contain the word "Apple" will be selected. Occurrences of "apple," "apples," or "APPLE" will not be selected.

When mixed uppercase and lowercase characters are included in a query, the search engine finds case-sensitive matches.

MANY

Counts the density of words, stemmed variations, or phrases in a document, and produces a relevance-ranked score for retrieved documents. The more occurrences of a word, stem, or phrase proportional to the amount of document text, the higher the score of that document when retrieved. Because the MANY modifier considers density in proportion to document text, a longer document that contains more occurrences of a word can score lower than a shorter document that contains fewer occurrences. You can use the MANY modifier with these operators: WORD, WILDCARD, STEM, SOUNDEX, PHRASE, SENTENCE, PARAGRAPH.

For example, to select documents based on the density of stemmed variations of the word "apple," you can enter the following:

<MANY> <STEM> apple

To select documents based on the density of the phrase "mission oak," you can enter the following:

<MANY> mission oak

The MANY modifier cannot be used with AND, OR, ACCRUE, or relational operators.

NOT

Use the NOT modifier with a word or phrase to exclude documents that show evidence of that word or phrase. For example, to select only documents that contain the words "cat" and "mouse" but not the word "dog," you can enter the following:

cat <AND> mouse <AND> <NOT> dog

You can use the NOT modifier only with the operators AND and OR.

ORDER

Use the ORDER modifier to specify that search elements must occur in the same order in which they were specified in the query. If search values do not occur in the specified order in a document, the document is not selected. You can use the ORDER modifier with these operators: PARAGRAPH, SENTENCE, and NEAR/N.

Always place the ORDER modifier just before the operator. The following syntax examples show how you can use either simple syntax or explicit syntax to retrieve documents containing the word "president" followed by the word "washington" in the same paragraph:

Simple syntax:

president <ORDER><PARAGRAPH> washington

Explicit syntax:

<ORDER><PARAGRAPH> ("president", "washington")

To search for documents containing the words "diver," "kills," "shark" in that order within 20 words of each other, use one of the following queries:

diver <ORDER><NEAR/20> kills <ORDER><NEAR/20> shark

<ORDER> <NEAR/20> (diver, kills, shark)

You can use the NEAR/N operator with the ORDER modifier to duplicate the behavior of the PHRASE operator. For example, to search for documents containing the phrase "world wide web," you can use the following syntax:

world <ORDER><NEAR/1> wide <ORDER><NEAR/1> web





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