Advanced searches produce a list of files that contain the word or phrase no matter where they appear in the text. This list gives the rules for formulating queries:

• Consecutive words must appear in the same order within a matching document.
• Queries are case-insensitive.
• Some common words are excluded by the indexing service and are ignored when used in queries except when they are used as placeholders in query phrases. For example, if you searched for “Word for Windows”, the results could give you “Word for Windows” and “Word and Windows”, because for is a noise word and appears in the exception list.
• Punctuation marks such as the period (.), colon (:), semicolon (;), and comma (,) are ignored during a search.
• To use specially treated characters such as &, |, ^, #, @, $, (, ), in a query, enclose your query in quotation marks (“).
• To search for a word or phrase containing quotation marks, enclose the entire phrase in quotation marks and then double the quotation marks around the word or words you want to surround with quotes. For example, “World-Wide Web or ““Web””” searches for World-Wide Web or “Web”.
• You can insert Boolean operators (AND, OR, and NOT) and the proximity operator (NEAR) to specify additional search information.
• The wildcard character (*) can match words with a given prefix. The query esc* matches the terms “ESC,” “escape,” and so on.

Boolean and Proximity Operators

Boolean and proximity operators can create a more precise query.

To Search For	Example	Results
Both terms in the same page	access and basic —Or— access & basic	Pages with both the words “access” and “basic”
Either term in a page	cgi or isapi —Or— cgi | isapi	Pages with the words “cgi” or “isapi”
The first term without the second term	access and not basic —Or— access & ! basic	Pages with the word “access” but not “basic”
Pages not matching a property value	not @size = 100 —Or— ! @size = 100	Pages that are not 100 bytes
Both terms in the same page, close together	excel near project —Or— excel ~ project	Pages with the word “excel” near the word “project”

Hints:

• You can add parentheses to nest expressions within a query. The expressions in parentheses are evaluated before the rest of the query.
• Use double quotes (“) to indicate that a Boolean or NEAR operator keyword should be ignored in your query. For example, “Abbott and Costello” will match pages with the phrase, not pages that match the Boolean expression. In addition to being an operator, the word and is a noise word in English.
• The NEAR operator is similar to the AND operator in that NEAR returns a match if both words being searched for are in the same page. However, the NEAR operator differs from AND because the rank assigned by NEAR depends on the proximity of words. That is, the rank of a page with the searched-for words closer together is greater than or equal to the rank of a page where the words are farther apart. If the searched-for words are more than 50 words apart, they are not considered near enough, and the page is assigned a rank of zero.
• The NOT operator can be used only after an AND operator in content queries; it can be used only to exclude pages that match a previous content restriction. For property value queries, the NOT operator can be used apart from the AND operator.
• The AND operator has a higher precedence than OR. For example, the first three queries are equal, 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

Note   The symbols (&, |, !, ~) and the English keywords AND, OR, NOT, and NEAR work the same way in all languages supported by Indexing Service. Localized keywords are also available when the browser locale is set to one of the following six languages:

Language	Keywords
German	UND, ODER, NICHT, NAH
French	ET, OU, SANS, PRES
Spanish	Y, O, NO, CERCA
Dutch	EN, OF, NIET, NABIJ
Swedish	OCH, ELLER, INTE, NÄRA
Italian	E, O, NO, VICINO

Note   The NEAR operator can be applied only to words or phrases.

Wildcards

Wildcard operators help you find pages containing words similar to a given word.

To Search For	Example	Results
Words with the same prefix	comput*	Pages with words that have the prefix “comput,” such as “computer,” “computing,” and so on
Words based on the same stem word	fly**	Pages with words based on the same stem as “fly,” such as “flying,” “flown,” “flew,” and so on

Exerpts from ixqlang.htm

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