The following rules apply to searches of all kinds:

Use the CONTAINS operator to search for any word or phrase within a particular property. If no operator is specified, the Contents operator is assumed.

Property names are preceded by either the “at” (@) for relational searches or number sign (#) for regular expression searches.

The following table lists the general document properties that can be searched:

The following searches are equivalent:

@DocTitle "the red dog"

@DocTitle Contains "the red dog"

The following table illustrates the use of the CONTAINS operator in both long and short form.

A document whose title property value is "The story of the red dog" would satisfy both of these searches.

The EQUALS operator specifies that the value of the property must exactly match the word or phrase in the query. The long form of the operator is EQUALS. The short form is the equal sign (=). For example:

@DocTitle = "the red dog"

Only a document whose Title property value is "the red dog" will satisfy this query. Indexing Service would not return a document with the title "The story of the red dog" because it contains words that are not in the query.

To search for the word "contains" or "equals," you must use quotation marks.

In Indexing Service, the query @contents = text is invalid.

You can use the Boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT in both content and property searches. The Boolean operator NEAR can be used only in content searches. When you use the NEAR operator in a query, a document matches the query if the words are within 50 words of each other in the document. The closer together the words are, the higher the rank that is assigned to the document in the result set. If the words are more than 50 words apart, they are not considered near enough, and the document is assigned a rank of zero. The NEAR operator can be applied only to words or phrases.

In content searches, use the NOT operator only after the AND operator. Use the NOT operator only to exclude documents that match a previous content restriction. For property-value searches, the NOT operator can be used apart from the AND operator.

The following table explains the Boolean operators and their associated symbols.

Boolean operators are available only in English.

The following table shows some examples of the use of Boolean operators:

Use quotation marks around the query phrase if it contains a word that is a Boolean operator. For example, "horse and rider" will be evaluated as a phrase, not as a Boolean expression.

Boolean operators are evaluated in the following order:

After precedence rules are applied, operators are processed left to right. You can use parentheses (( )) to override the normal precedence. For example, the first three searches are equivalent, but the fourth is not:

a AND b OR c

c OR a AND b

c OR (a AND b)

(c OR a) AND b

In the fourth query, the OR operator is evaluated first because the expression is enclosed in parentheses.

Free-text searches

With free-text searches, you can enter a group of words or a complete sentence. Indexing Service finds pages that best match the words and phrases in the free-text query. It does this by finding pages that match the meaning, rather than the exact wording, of the query. Indexing Service ignores Boolean, proximity, and wildcard operators.

You can use free-text searches to search both contents and property values. If you submit only the query text without specifying the type of query or the property, Indexing Service uses the free-text query and the Contents property by default.

The following searches return documents that contain text that most nearly matches the phrase, "How do I print in Microsoft Excel?"

Phrase searches

To search for a phrase, either enclose it in quotation marks or precede it with the {phrase} tag. Words in a phrase query must appear in document in the order entered, with no intervening words.

The following expressions are equivalent:

{phrase} big red truck {/phrase}

"big red truck"

When the phrase tag is used, the sequence and position of the words are significant in determining whether a document matches the query. The {phrase} and {freetext} tags are mutually exclusive and cannot be embedded or nested. Phrase searches can be used to search both contents and property values.

The following table provides examples of the long and short forms of the phrase tags.

In phrase searches, words on the exception list are treated as place holders. For example, if you searched for "Word for Windows", the results could give you "Word for Windows" and "Word and Windows", because "for" appears in the exception list.

The following provides examples of searches for various purposes.

The following list are the common words that are ignored by the search engine and cannot be searched: