Search Type

any of the words or all of the words

Finds a list of words or phases

exact phrase

Finds a single phrase (quotation marks are optional)

boolean

Finds a structured group of words or phrases linked by and, or not, w/.

Search Features

stemming

Finds grammatical variations on endings, like applies, applied, applying in a search for apply

fuzzy searching

Finds words even if they are misspelled.  A search for alphabet with a fuzziness of 1 would also find alphaqet.  With a fuzziness of 3, the same search would find both alphaqet and alpkaqet

phonic searching

Finds words that sound alike, like Smythe in a search for Smith

synonym expansion

Finds word synonyms using a comprehensive English language thesaurus (dtSearch Web can also support custom thesaurus terms)

Special Characters

? matches any single character

appl? matches apply or apple

* matches any number of characters

appl*ion matches application

~~ indicates numeric range

14~~18 looks for 14, 15, 16, 17 or 18

xfirstword matches the first word of a document

apple pie w/10 xfirstword

xlastword matches the last word of a document

apple pie w/10 xlastword

variable term weights

A number after a word assigns a specific positive or negative weight when ranking retrieved documents. Example:

apple:5 salad:-2

Fields in XML and Other Documents