Using advanced search in our docs

Need to find something in our docs? We’re here to help with some search tips! The following are tips to help find your topics quickly.

Finding multiple words

Use double quotes (") around each word to find content that contains all those words.
For example, "apple" "orange" "pear" retrieves content that contains all three words, in any order. Make sure you put spaces between the search words, otherwise, the search handles the text as one string. 

You also get results if there is a stemmed version of a word (e.g. apples). You won't get hits where content contains only the words apple and orange, for example.

Note: If you use single quotes (') around a word, the single quotes are ignored. For example, if you search for 'apple' 'orange' 'pear', you see hits for all content that contains any of the words apple or orange or pear. This is exactly as if you had searched without the single quotes.

Finding a phrase

Use double quotes (") around a phrase to find content that contains all the words in that phrase. For example, "spring vacation" retrieves all content that contains the words spring and vacation, in that order. 

You also get results if there is a stemmed version of the word (e.g. vacations). You won't get results where content contains only the word vacation. For example, if you use single quotes (') around a phrase, the single quotes are ignored. 

Excluding results containing certain words

Use the minus operator (-) in front of the search term to find content that does not include that word or phrase. For example, cooking tips -pasta returns content containing the words cooking and tips, but excludes those that contain the word pasta from the result set.

Note: Don’t repeat the same word after a minus operator (-). For example, the search "cannot send -cannot set" repeats the word “cannot” and therefore won’t return any results. Instead, search for "cannot send -set" so that the search returns results excluding the articles that contain the phrase “cannot set”.

Combining operands for advanced search

You can combine the operands above to find a very specific set of results.
For example, "reporting bugs" -support returns hits for content that contains both the words reporting and bugs, but doesn’t contain the word support.

Fuzzy search

Fuzzy search is a process where an article is deemed to be relevant to a search query even when there is not an exact match to the search terms in any of its fields. We use this technique to protect users from spelling mistakes.

Unlike stemming, which removes suffixes and prefixes to get to the root of a search term, fuzzy search uses edit distance to identify search results that contain terms close to the query terms. For example, if you search for “fresh produse” the search engine also returns results containing “fresh produce”.

The current rule for finding approximate matches is:

• Terms up to maximum two characters must match exactly
• Terms containing three to five characters are allowed one typo
• Terms longer than five characters are allowed two typos