General rules for queries

The following rules apply to queries of all kinds:

	Queries are not case sensitive.
	To use special characters in a query, (such as &, \|, ^, #, @, and $), enclose your query in quotation marks.
	Date and time values are of the form yyyy/mm/dd hh:mm:ss or yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss. The first two characters of the year and the entire time can be omitted. If you omit the first two characters of the year, the date is interpreted as being between 1930 and 2029. A 3-digit millisecond value can be specified after the seconds value. All dates and times are in Coordinated Universal Time. For example, 1997/12/8 13:10:03:452

Boolean operators

You can use the Boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT in queries. Use the NOT operator only after the AND operator. Use the NOT operator only to exclude documents that match a previous content restriction.

The following table explains the Boolean operators and their associated symbols.

Operator	Long form	Short form
AND	AND	&
OR	OR	\|
NOT	AND NOT	&!

The following table shows some examples of the use of Boolean operators:

To search for	Long form	Short form	Result
Two terms in the same document	red and dog	red & dog	Documents with both the words "red" and "dog"
Either of two terms in a document	red or dog	red \| dog	Documents with the words "red" or "dog"
One term without a second term	red and not dog	red & ! dog	Documents with the word "red" but not "dog"
Documents not matching a property value	not {prop name=size} = 100	! @size = 100	Documents that are not 100 bytes
Two terms that are close together in the same document	red near dog	red ~ dog	Documents with the word "red" near the word "dog"
Either of two terms and not two other terms if they are close together	red or dog and not (black near cat)	red \| dog &! (black~cat)	Documents with the word "red" or "dog" and not the words "black" and "cat" if they are within 50 words of each other

Use quotation marks around the query phrase if it contains a word that is a Boolean operator. For example, "horse and rider" will be evaluated as a phrase, not as a Boolean expression.

Order of precedence rules

Boolean operators are evaluated in the following order:

NOT
AND or NEAR
OR

After precedence rules are applied, operators are processed left to right. You can use parentheses (( )) to override the normal precedence. For example, the first three queries are equivalent, 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

In the fourth query, the OR operator is evaluated first because the expression is enclosed in parentheses.

Free-text and phrase queries

Free-text queries

With free-text queries, you can enter a group of words or a complete sentence. Indexing Service finds pages that best match the words and phrases in the free-text query. It does this by finding pages that match the meaning, rather than the exact wording, of the query. Indexing Service ignores Boolean, proximity, and wildcard operators.

You can use free-text queries to search both contents and property values. If you submit only the query text without specifying the type of query or the property, Indexing Service uses the free-text query and the Contents property by default.

The following queries return documents that contain text that most nearly matches the phrase, "How do I print in Microsoft Excel?"

Long form	Short form
{freetext} {prop name=contents} How do I print in Microsoft Excel?	How do I print in Microsoft Excel? Or $contents How do I print in Microsoft Excel

Phrase queries

To search for a phrase, either enclose it in quotation marks or precede it with the {phrase} tag. Words in a phrase query must appear in document in the order entered, with no intervening words.

The following expressions are equivalent:

{phrase} big red truck {/phrase}

"big red truck"

When the phrase tag is used, the sequence and position of the words are significant in determining whether a document matches the query. The {phrase} and {freetext} tags are mutually exclusive and cannot be embedded or nested. Phrase queries can be used to search both contents and property values.

The following table provides examples of the long and short forms of the phrase tags.

Long form	Short form
{phrase} big red truck {/phrase}	"big red truck"

In phrase queries, words on the exception list are treated as place holders. For example, if you searched for "Word for Windows", the results could give you "Word for Windows" and "Word and Windows", because "for" appears in the exception list.