kristen.sensabaugh- Use specific words. Type your search terms to see content containing all the specified words in any order.
- Use someone's name. Searching for people is like searching for specific words. You can't use phrase searching, wild cards, or field- and date-specific searching to find the names of people in the community.
- Use phrases. If you enclose a phrase in quotes, your search will return only content where the words in quotes occur next to each other and in the same order. For instance, specifying "Pressure Flow Calculator” will return text where this phrase appears exactly as quoted, such as includes a Pressure Flow Calculator, but will not return calculator for pressure and flow. Note: Content searches are case-insensitive. For both regular and phrase searches, we also match words that are similar, but not identical. View the video to see how phrases can be used to improve your search results.
- Content for terms where one character is optional or unknown. The question mark “?”can be used when one character in the search term is optional. For example, if you work like to find articles relevant to any 890 series GC, you can search:
- GC?890
Search will return results for GC5890, GC6890, GC7890, and GC8890.
- GC?890
- Content with words containing certain letter sequences. The wildcard character “*” matches any number of nonwhite space characters when it is placed at the beginning, end or within a word in the query. You can use the following examples to search for "tuning" or "contamination." For example:
- Tun*
Matches content containing the words tune, tuning, etc. - Con*ion
Matches content containing the words contagion, contamination etc.
View the video to see how using a ? or * in search impacts the search results.
Be aware that no partial word searches are performed without a wildcard! For example, if you wanted search results to include 6495c and G6495c, search for *6495c.
- Tun*
- Compound expressions using Boolean operators. The special keywords AND, OR and NOT let you create logical expressions in your searches. When you search, you need to use these terms in ALL CAPS to distinguish them from normal words. For instance, the word And in a search will be interpreted as the word "and," not the special operator AND. The AND operator says that the search should return content containing both the search terms before and after the AND operator. The OR operator returns content if either one of the terms matches. The NOT operator excludes documents that contain (in the fields searched for) the search term after the NOT. (You can't start a search with the NOT operator.) You can also use these operators with subqueries enclosed in parentheses to create more complex expressions as shown in the following examples:
- “room temperature” OR ambient
Matches text containing the exact phrase “room temperature” or the word ambient. - (Tune report) AND (TOF OR Q-TOF) AND NOT GC/MS
Matches content containing both "tune" and "report" in any order, plus either "TOF" or "Q-TOF," but not containing the word "GC/MS." This example shows how you can use parentheses to group more than one word together as a regular (nonphrase) search and to specify the order of operations. The NOT operator can only be applied to simple terms, not compound subqueries, and it cannot be used inside a subquery. - There are four distinct search situations for the AND operator (10 May)
- Search from home - weighted search, does not insert AND implicitly
- Search from a group - inserts AND implicitly between each term
- Search from advanced search page - inserts AND implicitly
- Search using quotes from any page (exact match) - does not insert AND, searches for all terms in that exact order
- “room temperature” OR ambient
- Special characters and operator words. The following characters and operator words are treated specially in the search syntax (separated by a single space):
* ( ) “ AND OR NOT
You can't search for these characters and operators because the application uses them for special search syntax. If you use these words in search text in a way that doesn't make sense to the application, the search engine may ignore them. For example, an odd number of quote characters will be ignored, and multiple asterisks next to each other will be interpreted as a single wildcard. - If your search returns too many results, narrow down the search with more specific keywords.
- If your search does not return any results, try expanding your search to All Community or check the Knowledge Articles.