Tips for Running a Search

Use the following suggestions to find the most accurate results.

Searching for Words

Search for exact words using quotation marks. For example, if you enter "fail", all records containing the exact word "fail" appear. If you do not include the quotation marks, the results will include exact words as well as similar words, such as fail, failing, or failed.

A word followed by an * (asterisk) must match a prefix of some word in the results. For example, B* results in all records containing a word starting with the letter "B". Inflectional generation is not supported. For example, giv* does not match gave.

Some similar word searches might not work if the stem of the word matches a word in the noise word list (see Noise Words) of your server database, such as out when searching for Outlook, or in when searching for inbox records. If you have this type of issue, try adding another letter to the search word, such as outl or inb when entering a search term.

Searching for Numbers

You can search for numbers in records by placing quotation marks around the numbers, such as "100". This returns all records containing the number "100". A purely numeric term (digits only, not alphanumeric) must match as a number. You can not search for partial numbers.

Searching for Phrases

You can search for records matching a phrase, such as "hard drive failure" or "system crash." Enter the phrase in the text box between quotation marks.

This type of search allows you to narrow your results by placing strict limitation on the words or phrase used in the search. By entering "print" with quotation marks, you will not get printer, printing, prints, and so on as the results exactly match your search phrase.

To find records containing words not in any specific order, do not use quotation marks.

Consider your Search Words

The more words you enter, the fewer results you get in return, but the results are a closer match to what you need. Not using quotation marks increases the number of records returned.

Case Sensitivity

A Microsoft SQL database search is not case sensitive, which means that upper and lower case letters are treated the same with regard to a text search. For example: bill or Bill could return an item (bill) and the name of a person (Bill). The database administrator is responsible for establishing how searches run on the database.

Noise Words

Noise words are also known as stop words. Punctuation and other commonly occurring words (such as articles and prepositions) are not considered when searching. HEAT uses the stock Microsoft SQL stop words. A complete list of stop words is at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms142551.aspx.

Multiple Word Search

A multiple word search is one that uses more than one word in the search text box. These are often referred to as BooleanUses AND, OR, and NOT as operators between expressions to produce results based on whether the complete expression is true or false. Also called logical. queries, which use Boolean operators (such as "AND" and "OR") in a single phrase. You can include both words with quotes and without quotes in a multiple word search.

By default, full text search uses "AND" when multiple words are entered without a Boolean operator. The search results contain both words in no particular order.

The following are examples of multiple word searches:

Searching Hyphenated Words

Common punctuation and separator characters are used as delimiters in tokenization.

• The search matches only records where ALL search tokens match.
• Search tokens are wrapped in forms of (inflectional, <search token>), which does not match with substrings. Therefore, hef will not match heft.
• Single letter search tokens are ignored. For example, if the search is heft-y, it will ignore the y.
• Common words, such as he are removed. Therefore carl-he results in a single search token carl.
• The token hef does not return results for heft, heftier, and heftiest. Instead, search by carl-hef* to get the matching records.

Words separated by hyphens match, except the matches must be in the same field of the results. For example, quickly-running matches any field that contains quick, quickly, quicker, and so on, as a word in the field and run, running, runner, and so on in the same field. However, the words in the results do not need to be separated by a hyphen or in the same order.