CFDA Search Tips
Sample Searches
The full-text search capability supports the following operators:
+
-
A leading plus sign indicates that this word must be
present in every result returned.
-
-
A leading minus sign indicates that this word must not be
present in any result returned.
(no operator)
-
By default (when neither
+
nor -
is specified) the word is optional,
but the results that contain it will be rated higher.
> <
-
These two operators are used to change a word's contribution to the
relevance value that is assigned to a result. The
>
operator
increases the contribution and the <
operator decreases it.
See the example below.
( )
-
Parentheses are used to group words into subexpressions.
Parenthesized groups can be nested.
~
-
A leading tilde acts as a negation operator, causing the word's
contribution to the result relevance to be negative. It's useful for marking
noise words. A result that contains such a word will be rated lower than
others, but will not be excluded altogether, as it would be with the
-
operator.
*
-
An asterisk is the truncation operator. Unlike the other operators, it
should be appended to the word, not prepended.
"
-
A phrase that is enclosed within double quote (`"`) characters matches only
results that contain the phrase literally, as it was typed.
The following examples demonstrate some search strings that use boolean
full-text operators:
'apple banana'
-
Find results that contain at least one of the two words.
'+apple +juice'
-
Find results that contain both words.
'+apple macintosh'
-
Find results that contain the
word ``apple'', but rank results higher if they also contain ``macintosh''.
'+apple -macintosh'
-
Find results that contain the
word ``apple'' but not ``macintosh''.
'+apple +(>turnover <strudel)'
-
Find results that contain the words
``apple'' and ``turnover'', or ``apple'' and ``strudel'' (in any
order), but rank ``apple turnover'' higher than ``apple strudel''.
'apple*'
-
Find results that contain words such as
``apple'', ``apples'', ``applesauce'', or ``applet''.
'"some words"'
-
Find results that contain the exact phrase ``some words'' (for example, results
that contain ``some words of wisdom'' but not ``some noise words''). Note
that the `"' characters that surround the phrase are operator characters
that delimit the phrase.
They are not the quotes that surround the search string
itself.