What Is a Search?
A search is the organized pursuit of information. Somewhere in a collection of documents, email messages, Web pages, and other sources, there is information that you want to find, but you have no idea where it is. The Verity search engine gives you the means of finding that information.
Tools for Searching The Verity search engine provides the following tools to help you find what you are looking for:
Date Searching See "Help on Date searching".
Simple Searches Simple searches are queries that consist of a single word or phrase.
Examples of Simple Searches
| Search Term |
Finds Pages That Contain |
| meet |
The string meet and stemmed variations, such as meets and meeting |
| "meet" |
The word meet |
| "S&L" |
The strings S&L, S & L, and S L (always enclose words like S&L in double quotation marks) |
| NOW |
The string NOW in upper case |
| repetitive stress injury |
The phrase repetitive stress injury |
| zoo* |
Words beginning with the string zoo |
| fl??ss |
Words beginning with fl and ending with ss with any two characters in between |
Searching With Phrases
The Verity search engine interprets any string of characters separated by spaces as a phrase.
| Tip |
Be careful of phrase searches that contain the following words because they are operators in the Verity Query Language:
- And: interpreted as the Verity Query Language AND operator
- Or: interpreted as the Verity Query Language OR operator
- Not: interpreted as the Verity Query Language NOT modifier
You can still search for phrases containing these words if you enclose them in double quotation marks.
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Using Wildcards
You can use wildcard characters if you are not sure of the spelling of your search term to expand your search:
- Asterisks (*) substitute for a string of characters of any length
- Question marks (?) substitute for a particular character
Combining Search Terms
You can combine search terms using Verity Query Language operators and modifiers to refine your searches.
Examples of Combining Search Terms
| Search Term |
Finds Pages That Contain |
| crab OR lobster OR shrimp |
Any of the words crab, lobster, or shrimp |
| bank AND loan AND business |
All of the words bank, loan, and business |
| bank, loan, business |
Any of the words bank, loan, and business. The more instances of these words in a page, the higher it appears in the results list. |
| bank NOT river |
The word bank but not the word river |
| HTML <near> publishing |
The word HTML close to the word publishing |
| HTML <sentence> publishing |
The word HTML in the same sentence as the word publishing |
| HTML <paragraph> publishing |
The word HTML in the same paragraph as the word publishing |
OR Operator
If your simple search has not produced a useful results list, you may have used the wrong term in your query. To increase the chances of finding a document that matches your query, you can use the OR operator with many synonymous or closely related terms.
AND Operator
The AND operator finds pages that match all terms in the query. If any of the search terms is not contained in a document, that document does not appear in the results list.
Excluding Terms From Searches
If you have used a term with more than one meaning in a query, you may generate a results list with documents that are not relevant to your search even though they match the query term.
NOT Modifier
To exclude irrelevant documents from a search, you can use the NOT modifier as part of the query.
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