Search help

At its simplest, a query can be just a word or a phrase. But with the tips on this page, you can expand the focus of your query to give you more complete results.

• Look for words with the same prefix. For example, in your query form type key* to find key, keying, keyhole, keyboard, and so on.

• Search for all forms of a word. For example, in the form type sink** find sink, sinking, sank, and sunk.

• Search with the keyword NEAR, rather than AND, for words close to each other. For example, both of these queries, system and manager and system near manager, look for the words system and manager on the same page. But with NEAR, the returned pages are ranked in order of proximity: The closer together the words are, the higher the rank of that page.

• Refine your queries with the AND NOT keywords to exclude certain text from your search. For example, if you want to find all instances of surfing but not the Net, write the following query:

  surfing AND NOT the Net

• Add the OR keyword to find all instances of either one word or another, for example:

  Abbott OR Costello

  This query finds all pages that mention Abbott or Costello or both.

• Put quotation marks around keywords if you want Index Server to take them literally. For instance, if you type the following query:
  
  "system near manager"

  Search will literally look for the complete phrase system near manager. But if you type the same query without the quotation marks:
  
  system near manager

  The search will look through all documents for the words system and manager.

• Use Free Text Queries if you want to enter queries using natural language. With free text queries you can enter any text you want, from a proper question, to a string of words and phrases. For example, if you type in the following query:
  
  "How do I use the Index Server administration snap-in?"

  Search will create a query for you automatically and begin the search. Note that when you're using free text queries, the regular query language features are disabled and keywords such as AND, OR, and NEAR are interpreted as normal words.

• Change the scope of your search just to one particular chapter. This is often useful if your searches return too many returns.
  
• Results to return, limit the number of results you would like to return.
  
• RANK - Sys Search returns a list of documents that match your query, known as a result set. Each item in the result set is a hit. Indexing Service can rank hits according to how well they fit the query, and it can sort results on multiple levels according to the value of any document property. On Web pages, the administrator can limit the maximum number of hits returned to the user. For example, a result set of 200 hits can be returned the user in 10 pages of 20 hits each.
  

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