Search rules

Search for specific words

This is the most basic search mode and is also the default. Type your search terms and press Enter to see the most relevant content, people, or places for those specified words in any order.

Search for someone's name

Searching for people is similar to searching for specific words. Note that you can't use phrase searching, wild cards, or field- and date-specific searching to find the names of people in the community.

Search for phrases

If you enclose a phrase in quotes, your search returns only content where the words in quotes occur next to each other and in the same order. For instance, specifying black cat returns text where this phrase appears exactly as quoted, such as our black cat brings us luck, but does not return the cat was hiding in the black box.

Note: Content searches are case-insensitive. For example, entering any of Jive, jive, or JIVE returns content with any of the words jive, JIVE, or jIVe. For both regular and phrase searches, we also match words that are very similar, but not identical.

Search for content with words containing certain letter sequences

The wildcard character * matches any number of non-whitespace characters when it is placed at the end of a word or within a word in the query.

You can use the following examples to search for multiplication or concatenation. Note that Spotlight searches automatically use wildcards, even if you do not type * in the string.

mult*: Matches content containing the words multiplication, multiple, multimodal, multitude
con*ion: Matches content containing the words contagion and concatenation

Note: A wildcard cannot be used at the beginning of a word, and it can't be used as a standalone word.

Limitations in searches for certain letter sequences

The search engine splits words into subwords and performs optional transformations on subword groups. Words are split into subwords with the following rules:

Split on intra-word delimiters (by default, all non-alpha-numeric characters), for example, Wi-Fi → Wi, Fi
Split on case transitions: PowerShot → Power, Shot
Split on letter-number transitions: SD500 → SD, 500
Leading and trailing intra-word delimiters on each subword are ignored: //hello---there, dude → hello, there, dude
Trailing 's are removed for each subword: O’Neil’s → O, Neil

Based on these rules, sometimes you may not get the results you are looking for. For example:

If the name of an idea is Ideatest, this idea is not returned when you search for test.
If the name of a document is Summer0718photos, this document is returned when you search for 0718 or photos. But it is not returned if you search for 07, or 18, or phot.

Synonym searching

Your community may or may not support synonym searches, depending on whether your community administrator has enabled this feature. Ask your community administrator whether synonym searches are supported in your community.

If synonym searches are enabled, your searches return results for synonyms. For example, if you searched for search tips, the search engine would return any found results for search tips AND find tips because search and find are synonyms.

Filtering results by date

You can filter the results to see only content items that have been updated within, for example, the last 30 days: Select the period from the list, and enjoy the filtered result.

The default setting is All time, which does not put any date range restriction on your search. The other available ranges are 1 day, 7 days, 30 days, 90 days, and 1 year.

Compound expressions by using Boolean operators

The special keywords AND, OR, and NOT let you create logical expressions in your searches. When you search, you need to use these terms in capital letters to distinguish them from normal words. For instance, the word And in a search is interpreted as the word and, not the special operator AND.

The AND operator says that the search should return content containing both the search terms before and after the AND operator. The OR operator returns content if either one of the terms matches. The NOT operator excludes documents that contain (in the fields searched for) the search term after the NOT. You can't start a search with the NOT operator.

You can also use these operators with sub-queries enclosed in parentheses to create more complex expressions as shown in the following examples. If you don't add an operator to your search, search adds the AND operator between words for any type of search.

Consider the following examples of searching for a text fragment:

"quick brown fox" OR rabbit: Matches text containing the exact phrase quick brown fox or the word rabbit.
quick brown fox: Matches content containing the words quick, brown, and fox in any order. Search implicitly assumes the AND operator when an operator is not specified.
(quick brown) AND (fox OR rabbit) AND NOT forest: Matches content containing both quick and brown in any order, plus either fox or rabbit, but not containing the word forest. This example shows how you can use parentheses to group more than one word together as a regular (non-phrase) search and to specify the order of operations.

Note: The NOT operator can only be applied to simple terms, not compound sub-queries, and it cannot be used inside a sub-query.

Special characters and operator words

The following characters and operator words are treated specially in the search syntax (separated by a single space):

* ( ) " AND OR NOT: You can't search for these characters and operators, because the application uses them for special search syntax. If you use these words in search text in a way that doesn't make sense to the application, the search engine ignores them. For example, an odd number of quote characters is ignored, and multiple asterisks next to each other are interpreted as a single wildcard (*).

Promoted search results

You may see some results marked as Promoted when you search. These results have been selected by an administrator to ensure that certain content is always associated with one or more search keywords, even if the keyword isn't actually in the content. For example, your site administrator may want users who type Benefits to always see the Human Resources page as the first result, even if there are many other pages with titles containing the word Benefits. If a result has been promoted, you may see it again farther down the results page.