User Guide

286 Chapter 15 Indexing and Searching Data
A simple query automatically employs the STEM operator and the MANY modifier.
STEM searches for words that derive from those entered in the query expression, so
entering “find” returns documents that contain “find,” “finding,” “finds,” and so on.
The MANY modifier presents the documents returned in the search as a list based on
a relevancy score.
Explicit query expressions
You can construct explicit queries using a variety of operators, which are described
later in this section. Most operators in an explicit query expression must be
surrounded by angle brackets < >. You can use the AND, OR, and NOT operators
without angle brackets.
Expression syntax
You can use either simple or explicit syntax when stating simple query syntax. The
syntax you use determines whether the search words you enter are stemmed, and
whether the words that are found contribute to relevance-ranked scoring.
Simple syntax
When you use simple syntax, the search engine implicitly interprets single words as if
they were modified by the MANY and STEM operators. By implicitly applying the
MANY operator, the search engine calculates each document’s score based on the
density of the search term in the searched documents. The more frequent is the
occurrence of a word in a document, the higher is the document’s score.
As a result, the search engine ranks documents according to word density as it
searches for the word you specify, as well as words that have the same stem. For
example, “films”, “filmed,” and “filming” are stemmed variations of the word “film.”
To search for documents containing the word “film” and its stem words, you can
enter the word “film” without modification. When documents are ranked by
relevance, they appear in a list with the most relevant documents at the top.
Explicit syntax
When you use explicit syntax, the search engine interprets the search terms you
enter as literals. For example, by entering the word “film” (including quotation
marks) using explicit syntax, the stemmed versions of the word “film”, “films,”
“filmed,” and “filming” are ignored.
The following table shows all operators available for conducting searches of
ColdFusion Verity collections.
Verity Search Operators
< CONTAINS PHRASE
<= ENDS SENTENCE