Search Engine Help

To start searching, simply type one or more terms of interest to the query field and press Enter (or click the search button). QuestAgent search engine will find and list the most relevant documents, taking into account:

• frequency of used search terms in a document and document set,
• their position in a document (e.g. document body or title), and
• relative closeness of search terms to each other.

By default, QuestAgent search engine will return only documents that include all of specified search terms. You can change this using negative and positive terms (see examples bellow). Searches are not case sensitive.

QuestAgent supports stemming technology that allows you to find documents with word variations. It means that if you search for term qualification search engine will also find documents with terms qualify, qualifier, etc. You can put quotation marks around the word (e.g. "qualification") to disable stemming and with only documents containing the exact term.

If you want to find documents containing an exact phrase put quotation marks around your search terms.

If supported by provided index, you can search in specific document fields such as title or other Meta data fields. To search in a field, specify field name followed by a colon and a term or phrase specified in quotes (e.g. title:security or author:james).

Note: Some of the described features may be disabled by the publisher and therefore not available for your use.

Examples

Simple search

  mortgage
  tax return

Search for an exact phrase

To lookup for phrase simply enclose multiple words in quotation marks.

   "tax return"

Finds documents containing the phrase tax return.

   "sender and receiver"

Finds documents containing the phrase sender and receiver. Notice that and word is usually classified as a stop term (too common or irrelevant term) and thus may not be indexed (although place-holder in document index is preserved).

Search using wildcards

Matches any group of characters.

   qual*

Searches for documents containing any word starting with the letters qual, such as qualify, quality, qualification, qualifier, and so forth.

Positive and negative terms

Put minus sign (-) in front of words you want to avoid in documents. You can also put plus sign (+) to mark word that is required to occur in found documents. Use of plus or minus sign in a query changes meaning of query in a way that all words (or phrases) without these marks are optional (but they increase relevance of a document if found in it).

   bug -insect

To find all documents containing word bug but excluding documents with word insect.

   +security products

To find all documents containing word security and the word products is optional.

   +security products

To find all documents containing word security and the word products is optional.

This can also be combined with phrases, as in

   +"tax return" filling

Proximity search

Proximity search allows you to find words near to each other within specified distance.

   "acknowledgment message"~5

To find words acknowledgment and message within 5 word sequence.

Field search

Search can be narrowed to a particular (Meta) field of a document.

   title:security

To find documents containing word security in document title.

   title:(security products)

To find documents containing words security and _products) in document title.

   title:"security products"

To find phrase "language settings" in document title.

Boosting matches

Boosting can be used for additional weighting of certain matches in a complex query. Documents where boosted words/phrases are found will have higher relevance (in accordance with the given weight).

   message^20 protocol

To find documents containing words message and protocol, but more appreciate message word in a document.