You can increase the relevancy of your website searches by using "Search Operators". These are characters that can help you narrow down your search results to more relevant results.
| Operator | Description |
|---|---|
| + | A leading plus sign indicates that this word must be present in each result that is returned. |
| - | A leading minus sign indicates that this word must not be present in any of the results that are returned. Note: The - operator acts only to exclude results that are otherwise matched by other search terms. Thus, a search that contains only terms preceded by - returns an empty result. It does not return "all results except those containing any of the excluded terms." |
| > < | These two operators are used to change a word's contribution to the relevance of each result. The > operator increases the contribution and the < operator decreases it. |
| ( ) | Parentheses group words into subexpressions. Parenthesized groups can be nested. |
| ~ | A leading tilde acts as a negation operator, causing the word's contribution to the result's relevance to be negative. This is useful for marking "noise" words. A row containing such a word is rated lower than others, but is not excluded altogether, as it would be with the - operator. |
| * | The asterisk serves as the truncation (or wildcard) operator. Unlike the other operators, it should be appended to the word to be affected. Words match if they begin with the word preceding the * operator. |
| " | A phrase that is enclosed within double quote characters ("example words") matches only results that contain the phrase literally, as it was typed. |
The following examples demonstrate some search strings that use search operators:
| Search Query | Result |
|---|---|
| apple banana | Find results that contain at least one of the two words. |
| +apple +juice | Find results that contain both words. |
| +apple macintosh | Find results that contain the word "apple", but rank results higher if they also contain "macintosh". |
| +apple -macintosh | Find results that contain the word "apple" but not "macintosh". |
| +apple ~macintosh | Find results that contain the word "apple", but if the row also contains the word "macintosh", rate it lower than if row does not. This is "softer" than a search for '+apple -macintosh', for which the presence of "macintosh" causes the row not to be returned at all. |
| +apple +(>turnover <strudel) | Find results that contain the words "apple" and "turnover", or "apple" and "strudel" (in any order), but rank "apple turnover" higher than "apple strudel". |
| apple* | Find results that contain words such as "apple", "apples", "applesauce", or "applet". |
| "some words" | Find results that contain the exact phrase "some words" (for example, results that contain "some words of wisdom" but not "some noise words"). Note that the """ characters that enclose the phrase are operator characters that delimit the phrase. They are not the quotes that enclose the search string itself. |