Detail Explanation of the Query Operators

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General

Entries without any operators are assumed to be verbatim. Most operators can be used in conjunction with each other.

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Verbatim - " "

The Fulcrum (C) search engine is looking for an exact match of the term you have entered. For example; entering the term "colorma" or colorma will return no documents.

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Near - ( )

The near operator specifies that the terms in the query must be found within a defined distance of characters from eachother (for the Knowledge Distribution System, this has been set to 200 indexed characters). The purpose of this operator is to try to ensure that the retrieved document contains a relevent reference to the query subject.

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And - [ ]

The and operator tells the Fulcrum (C) search engine to search for documents containing instances of all words in your entry; e.g. entering [nis colormap] in the Solaris Patch database returns no documents because there are no patches that contain both terms.

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Or - { }

The or operator tells the search engine to look for documents containing at least one match of the terms in your entry; e.g. entering {nis colormap tcp} will find all documents that have the term nis in them, all documents that have the term colormap in them, and all documents that have the term tcp in them.

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Not - !

The not operator allows you to find all the documents that do not contain a given term. For example if you want a list of all the Patch READMEs that do not contain the term nis you would enter ! nis. This list, in and of itself is not very useful. However, you can use the not operator in conjunction with other operators; e.g. [nis ! tcp] would generate a list of documents that contain the term nis and do not contain the term tcp.

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Suffix - *

Entering the term color* will return all documents that contain the word color and any subsequent characters. Please note, that the * operator does not work as a prefix - entering *olor would return no documents.

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