Chat now with support
Chat with Support
Self Service Tools
Knowledge Base
Notifications & Alerts
Product Support
Software Downloads
Technical Documentation
User Forums
Video Tutorials
RSS Feed

Search Tutorial

Search Tips and Tricks

Search allows you to view all support content by keywords and filters. See below for helpful tips and tricks. Understanding how the search engine treats your keywords will help you devise effective queries and revise ineffective ones.

Search Default Behavior

The search engine default behavior considers ALL the words in a keyword.  All keywords in the text search must be matched in order for the result to be returned. 

Example: Using the Keywords “Failed to locate the following DLL” will search for all words Failed AND to AND locate AND the AND following AND DLL. Your search results will link to documents containing ALL those keywords entered.

Any of the Following Keywords
If you want the search engine to consider ANY of the words in the search term, then separate teach word by OR. 

Example: Using the Keywords “Failed OR locate OR following OR DLL” will search for ANY words containing Failedlocatefollowing or DLL . Your search results will link to documents containing ANY of the keywords entered.

Auto Correction

Keyword search automatically determines if the keyword entered may have been misspelled if zero results are returned with the keyword used.

Example: Showing results for ebuziness – Search instead for ebusiness

Auto Suggestions

The search engine by default DOES NOT infer meaning of words unless the keywords have been specifically added to our global thesaurus or is simple word. See stemming below for simple word recognition. 

Example: (infer meaning) if you search for cheap search WILL NOT locates results with inexpensive
Example: (thesaurus defined) if you search for Dotnet search WILL locates results with .Net. 

Stemming

Locates any word related to the search term you enter. If you type program, search locates results with programprogramsprogrammersprogramming, and such.

Stop Words

Stop words are words that are set to be ignored by search. Typically, common words such as "the" are included in the stop word list. In addition, the stop word list can include extraneous words contained in a typical question, to increase the effectiveness of the query. Here is the default list of stop words that was implemented to help with your search:

about, above, an, and, any, are, can, do, find, for, from, have, how, I, in, is, me, not, or, over, show, the, under, what, when, where, why, with, you and your

If you want your search to include any of these stop words then you must put the stop word in quotes.

Case Sensitivity

Keywords ARE NOT case sensitive. If you use all lowercase letters, ALL UPPERCASE, or Mixed Case Letters, the search will ignore case distinction and match your terms in any case.

Special Character

The Search engine does not recognize punctuation and special character.
The search engine ignores the following , . ; ? [ ] ( ) @ / * < >
Combine terms separated by hyphen e-mail will match email
Exception, Apostrophes are searched Error’s is a different result than Errors.

Favored In Search Results

Search also favors or ranks results higher by the following: 

 


Advanced Queries

Advanced search gives you several ways to search the Knowledge Base repository. You can look for content with Find All These Words or These Exact Words or a Boolean Search where you can search for content that has a set of words but NOT other words. All three types of search must be done independent of each other and cannot be combined into one search.

Find All These Words

By entering keywords into the Find All These Words, you are telling Search to consider only results that have all these words in the search results. The search engine will filter out partial matches and display the results with the words in the order you entered them and those that are closer together will display higher in the results.

Find These Exact Words

By entering search terms into the Find These Exact Terms, you are telling the search engine to consider the exact words in that exact order without any change. The search engine already uses the order and the fact that the words are together as a very strong signal and will display the results with the words in the exact order higher in the results than those results that contain partial ordering or partial matches, so quotes are usually unnecessary. By insisting on doing a phrase search you might be missing valid results accidentally. For example, a search for [ "Error:1234 server not found" ] (with quotes) will miss the pages that refer to Error server not found. 
However if your results are returning a large number of records and the content you want is not readily available then using a These Exact Words search will help you narrow your results quickly.

Boolean

The search engine default behavior is to consider all the words in a search. If you want to specifically allow either one of several words, you can use the OR and NOT Boolean operators. Boolean searches are executed in the advance field by entering terms in One or more of these words and Not These Words. A good use of the Boolean search option is when using stop words. Stop words include: "the", "and", and "job" and other words that appear in most documents. Stop words are automatically removed from your query, which may affect returned results if you do not select Boolean.

One or more of these words

By entering the terms into One or More of these words separated by spaces or commas, instructs the search engine to locate either one or the other words and sometimes both.

For ExampleCobol OR Java locates either word separately and both words in some instances. This operator is not case sensitive.

 

And Not These Words

By entering the terms into And Not These Words separated by spaces or commas, instructs the search engine to exclude any of the words entered.

For ExampleCobol AND NOT Java locates only results with the word Cobol but without the word Java. This operator is not case sensitive.