Search tips
You can use search to find documents, text in a document, applications, and people. Below are some recommendations for composing an effective search query.
Web-style Search syntax
The new default for searching a view is web style syntax. If your search query has several words, the documents returned will contain those words, but not necessarily in the order you specified. This is a change from the current Notes® syntax; to search exact terms, quotation marks are now needed.
- To toggle to a Notes-style search for a particular query, you can prepend a forward slash(/) to the beginning of the query to switch off web-style syntax for the duration if that search.
- To change the default setting from web style to notes style, choose and clickBasic Notes Client Configuration (Notes Basic client users: Choose , Basic tab). Then, in the additional options list, select Use Notes (not web) query syntax in the view search bar
Be specific
Use words you think will be only in the documents you want. Searching for Siamese in a pets discussion usually gives you fewer results than cats, and they'll be closer to what you want.
Use double quotes to search for an exact phrase
Cats are choosy eaters
finds that exact phrase.
Single quotes do not work.
Learn a few basic operators
If the application is full-text indexed, there are certain words and characters called operators that Search reads as instructions rather than words. You may want to learn some basic operators such as OR, AND, or NOT and use them in searches.
Select Use Word Variants
and Fuzzy
search
These are selections available when you open
the More section of the Search bar. They widen
your search, making it more comprehensive. Once these are activated,
you can try using base words, or parts of words - pair
to find pairing
or pairs
; *ray
to
find gray,
stray,
or bray.
Use different words with the same meaning
If,
when searching for documents about cats, your results include fewer
documents than expected, try cats OR felines OR kittens
. The
OR operator finds documents containing any of these.
Keep an eye on the number of results you get back
The number of results show in the upper left corner of the Search bar. If you have too many or too few results, try reformulating your search.
If there are too many results, try using AND. If there are too few results, try OR.
cats OR dogs Returns documents with one or the other (returns more results)
cats AND dogs Returns documents with both (returns fewer results)
Use the fill out example form
condition
This is a powerful way of doing a complicated full-text (non-Domain) search. You can specify to a high degree what documents you want returned. You do not need to fill in every field in the example form - blank fields match all documents. For best results, complete only the one or two fields that are most specific to your search.
Sorting results using view columns
This tip is for full-text search only. If you are used to sorting a view with the triangle icons at the top of each column, select either show all documents or keep current order as your sorting option in the More section of the Search bar.