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Introductory Note
We use SEARCH'97 Information Server, a program product of Verity, Inc. Anyone who is familiar with the Verity® query language may use it without further reference to the material here.

Basic Queries
Enter basic queries as a series of single words or phrases, separated by commas. The search will return documents which contain any of those words or any of those phrases. It will score each document according to how many matching words and phrases it contains. For example, if you enter the query...

film, movie, location, sound stage

...documents containing the phrase "sound stage" or the word "location" or the word "film" or the word "movie" will be found. Those dealing with shooting theatrical movies, either on a sound stage or on locaton, will have a high score. Those dealing with other aspects of the film industry will have lower scores. Those dealing with thin layers of oil on roadways are likely to be scored even lower.

Case does not matter--the query above will find documents containing "film", "Film" and "FILM". It will also find words which are stemmed variations: "films" and "filmed" for example.

This is all that you need to know, unless you wish to assemble sophisticated queries. If you do, read on.

Basic Operators
Operators can be used to make queries more specific. For example,...

film AND movie AND location AND sound stage

...will exclude documents about other aspects of the film industry (and about oil on roadways). But it will have unintended effects as it will also exclude documents about movies filmed entirely on location or entirely on a sound stage. A better query would be...

(movie, film) AND (location, sound stage)

...requiring the word "movie" or the word "file" to be in the same document as the word "location" or the phrase "sound stage".

Operators are case-insensitive: AND and and are equivalent.

Operators are enclosed by "pointy brackets". Thus, the AND operator is strictly rendered as <AND>. However, three and only three operators are exempt from the "pointy bracket" rule: AND, OR and NOT. These may be bracketed--it is purely optional.

• AND finds documents containing both of the terms.

• OR finds documents containing either term (unless one is an advanced user, one may consider it equivalent to a comma).

• NOT finds documents which contain the first term, but excludes documents containing the second term. Computer <NOT> laptop excludes documents containing the word "laptop" and then returns documents containing the word "computer".

• "" (quotation marks) enclosing a phrase or a word returns exact matches. Note that this means quotation marks enclosing a word suppresses stemming. Thus film finds documents containing "film", "films", "filming", etc., but "film" returns only documents containing "film".

• <NEAR> finds documents containing both terms in proximity to one another. Thus, whereas "diver kills shark" finds documents containing exactly that phrase, diver<NEAR>kills<NEAR>shark also finds documents containing "shark kills diver".

• <NEAR/n> finds documents containing both terms within n words of one another. Thus baseball<NEAR/10>yankee finds documents with "Yankee" (or "Yankees") within ten words of "baseball".

• * (asterisk) is a wildcard representing one or more characters. Wild* returns documents containing "wildcard", "wilderness" and "[Gene] Wilder".

Advanced Operators

• <THESAURUS> finds documents containing the word and similiar words. For example, searching on altitude may find a few matching documents, but searching on <THESAURUS> altitude would also find documents containing words such as "height" and "elevation."

• <SENTENCE> finds documents containing terms in the same sentence. Thus it is similar to, but more restrictive than <NEAR>. For example, diver<sentence> kills<sentence>shark would be satisfied by both "A diver kills a shark." and "The shark killed the diver." (stemming makes "kills" and "killed" equivalent). But, unlike <NEAR>, it would not be satisfied by "Pollution kills sharks. Divers can be sickened by it."

• <PARAGRAPH> finds documents containing terms in the same paragraph.

• <ORDER> is used in conjunction with <NEAR>, <SENTENCE> and <PARAGRAPH> to require that the terms in the document appear in the same order as the terms in the query. Thus diver<SENTENCE>kills<SENTENCE>shark would exclude "Shark kills diver."

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