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Verity's powerful, full-text search features allow you to search with great accuracy. The full-text search will search over the entire text of documents based on the query you provide. This query can contain one or more words and phrases, or it can be a query expression that uses Verity query language, such as operators and modifiers.

There are many ways to ask a question using the full-text parser. The simplest way is to enter one or more words and phrases separated by commas. Using Verity operators and modifiers you can apply logic to search terms. The information below tells you about some of the ways you can ask questions.


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Searching for Words and Phrases

If you enter words and phrases separated by commas into the query, each comma represents the ACCRUE operator, which is a fuzzy OR--it means, the more of these the better." By default, words and phrases in the query are stemmed, meaning the search is broadened to include the stemmed variations of these words. The effect of the ACCRUE operator is to assign importance in the form of a score to each document having matched the query. The score assigned to a document is based on the number of word matches the document contains and the density of those matches.

The query below will search for the phrase "desktop publisher" and stemmed variations of the word "editor":

desktop publisher, editor

You may want to search for the word "editor" and not the word along with all of its stemmed variations. To do this, you just delimit the search term in double-quotation marks. For example, the following query will search for the word "editor":

"editor"

Note that searches are not case-sensitive by default. This means you can use "EDITOR" or "editor" in the above examples and get the same search results.


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Using Verity Query Language

You can use operators and modifiers to apply logic to your query and pinpoint the exact information you are interested in. Two popular operators are: AND and OR. A modifier can be used with an operator to further define your question for the search engine. A frequently-used modifier is: NOT. By default, the words "and," "or," and "not" are interpreted as Verity query language; all other query language elements, such as the WILDCARD operator, are interpreted as words unless surrounded by angle brackets. Sample query expressions using query language are below.

The AND operator selects documents that contain all of the search elements you specify. To find documents that contain both at least one stemmed variation of the word "HTML" and at least one stemmed variation of the word "editor," you can use the following query:

HTML and editor

The OR operator selects documents that show evidence of at least one of the search elements. To find documents that contain either at least one stemmed variation of the word "HTML" or at least one stemmed variation of the word "editor," you can use the following query:

HTML or editor

The MANY modifier is applied to words and phrases for a full-text search by default. This modifier affects how documents are scored and tells the search engine to give the highest scores to documents with the highest density of word matches. When you enter a word such as "editor" as a query, the search engine interprets this as:

<MANY> <STEM>editor

The <STEM> operator says search for the stemmed variations of this word. The <STEM> operator and the related <WORD> operator cannot be used explicitly in this version of Verity search.


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Proximity Search Methods

There are several search methods for doing proximity searches. A proximity search looks for documents containing search terms within close proximity of each other. The following operators enable proximity search methods: PHRASE, SENTENCE, PARAGRAPH.

The SENTENCE and PARAGRAPH operators are used to specify a search within a sentence or paragraph. The syntax for using these operators is similar. To find documents that contain the word "HTML" and stemmed variations of the word "publishing" within the same paragraph, you can use this query:

"HTML"<PARAGRAPH>publishing

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Excluding Information

Want to exclude something from a search? That's what the NOT modifier does. For example, to find documents containing stemmed variations of the words "server" and "configuration" in the same sentence, but not stemmed variations of the word "firewall", you enter this query:

server<SENTENCE>configuration<AND> <NOT>firewall

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