User Guide

290 Chapter 15 Indexing and Searching Data
Operators and modifiers
The power of the cfsearch tag is in the control it provides over the Verity search
engine. The engine offers users a high degree of specificity in setting search
parameters.
Operators
An operator represents logic to be applied to a search element. This logic defines the
qualifications that a document must meet to be retrieved. You can use operators to
refine your search or to influence the results in other ways. For example, you could
construct an HTML form for conducting searches. In the form, a user could perform
a search for a single term: server. You can refine your search by limiting the search
scope in a number of ways. Operators are available for limiting a query to a sentence
or paragraph, and you can search words based on proximity.
Ordinarily, you use operators in explicit searches, as shown here:
"<operator>search_string"
The following operator types are available:
Evidence operators
Evidence operators let you specify a basic word search or an intelligent word search.
A basic word search finds documents that contain only the word or words specified
in the query. An intelligent word search expands the query terms to create an
expanded word list so that the search returns documents that contain variations of
the query terms.
Documents retrieved using evidence operators are not ranked by relevance unless
you use the MANY modifier.
Operator type Purpose
Evidence Specifies basic and intelligent word searches.
Proximity Specifies the relative location of words in a document.
Relational Searches fields in a collection.
Concept Identifies a concept in a document by combining the meanings of
search elements.
Score Manipulates the score returned by a search element. You can set
the score percentage display to as many as four decimal places.
Natural
language
Allows the use of natural language expressions in forming queries.