One of the benefits of using advanced search to perform text searches is performing more complex text searches, such as searching for multiple words or phrases. All advanced search types can be customized with advanced search operators and wildcards.
To perform a simple text search, type the word you want to search for. To search for the word pruning, type the following:
- pruning
To search for a phrase, enclose it in quotes. To search for the phrase “pruning shears” type the following:
- “pruning shears”
You can make searches more powerful by combining words or phrases with operators. To find all documents that pertain to "pruning" and contain the word "maple" or "cherry," you would use one of the following:
- pruning & (maple | cherry)
- (maple | cherry) & pruning
In the search criteria specified above, the pipe "|" represents "OR" and the ampersand "&" represents "AND." In the above example, the order in which search criteria are listed does not matter, however, in other cases, the order can make a huge difference. If you remove the parentheses from the above example, you end up with the following:
- pruning & maple | cherry
This would find all documents containing the words "pruning" and "maple." It would also find all documents that contain the word "cherry."
- maple | cherry & pruning
This would find all documents containing the word "maple." It would also find all documents that contain the words "cherry" and "pruning."
Proximity Searches
You can also search for words based on whether they are within a certain number of words of each other. These are called Proximity or Within searches. To specify a proximity search, separate two phrases with a caret (^) followed by the maximum number of words that can come between the two phrases. If you were only interested in documents where the word "pruning" occurs within 15 words of either the word "maple" or "cherry," you would use one of the following:
- (maple | cherry) ^15 pruning
- pruning ^15 (maple | cherry)
More sophisticated proximity search operators allow you to specify that certain words don't occur within N number of words of each other, or that they occur within N number of words, but in a specific order. For more information on these operators, see the Advanced Search Syntax white paper.