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You can improve the relevance of the records returned by your search requests by using search operators. Operators allow you to specify how the data you specify in the search field should match the data in the records retrieved. There are two types of test operators you can specify:
The following table shows the types of test operators that can be used on the various kinds of fields.
Relational Operators The relational operators search numeric or short text fields, comparing numeric or alphabetic values. Relational operators are most often used to compare values to the entire contents of the field. The following table shows the relational operators and their meanings.
Inclusive Operators The inclusive operators are designed to let you search for word(s) that occur anywhere in a text field. To fully understand the functions of the inclusive operators, you must know the definitions of stopwords, keywords and context units. Stopwords are small, common words that have little or no retrieval value, such as the, a, of, and for. Keywords are any valid search terms; they are words or numbers that have not been designated as stopwords. Stopwords are generally not indexed and cannot be retrieved. Context units are meaningful groupings of words (for example, a common context unit is a sentence or paragraph).
Using Mixed Operators in Search Values You can combine OR (,) and AND (&) operators in search field values to specify a relationship between multiple terms. For example, valid field values with mixed operators include the following
Also, you can use parentheses to delineate groups or establish an order in which search values are processed. Parentheses are processed from the left to the right, and nested parentheses are processed starting with the first pair. Mixed operator searches must conform to the following rules:
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