User Guide

584 Chapter 25: Using Verity Search Expressions
When you put a search term in quotation marks, Verity does not use the STEM operator. For
example, a search for “instructional”—enclosed in quotation marks, as shown in “Preventing
stemming” on page 583—does not return files that contain instruct, instructs, instructions, and
so on (unless the files also contain instructional).
Note: The Verity products and documentation refers to the Explicit parser as the BooleanPlus parser.
When you specify type="explicit" the search expression must be a valid Verity Query
Language expression. As a result, an individual search term must be in explicit quotation marks.
The following table shows valid and invalid criteria:
Using AND, OR, and NOT
Verity has many powerful operators and modifiers available for searching (for more information,
see “Operators and modifiers” on page 592). However, users might only use the most basic
operators—AND, OR, and the modifier NOT. The following are a few important points:
• You can type operators in uppercase or lowercase letters.
• Verity reads operators from left to right.
• The AND operator takes precedence over the OR operator.
• Use parentheses to clarify the search. Terms enclosed in parentheses are evaluated first;
innermost parentheses are evaluated first when there are nested parentheses.
• To search for a literal AND, OR, or NOT, enclose the literal term in double-quotation marks;
for example:
love "and" marriage
Note: Although NOT is a modifier, you use it only with the AND and OR operators. Therefore, it is
sometimes casually referred to as an operator.
The following table gives examples of searches and their results:
Attribute Effect
criteria="government"
Generates an error
criteria="'government'" or
criteria='"government"'
Finds only government
criteria="<WORD>government"
Finds only government
criteria="<STEM>government"
Finds government, governments, and governmental
criteria="<MANY><STEM>government"
Finds government, governments, and governmental ranked
by relevance
criteria="<WILDCARD>governmen*"
Finds government, governments, and governmental
Search term Returns files that contain
doctorate AND nausea both doctorate and nausea
doctorate “and” nausea the phrase doctorate and nausea
“doctorate and nausea” the phrase doctorate and nausea