Search help topics

Case sensitivy.

By default, searches are case-insensitive. The Case sensitive check box enables you to search matching the case of the word or phrase you enter.

Full word and phrase matches

You can search for full or hyphenated words.

Phrase search enables you to search for documents containing an exact sentence or phrase by entering the search text in double quotes (“).

Do not include special characters in the search text of a phrase search.

Wildcard characters

The wildcard feature enables you to replace individual letters, or sequences of letters, within the search word.

Use a question mark (?) to replace a single character.

Use an asterisk (*) to represent several (or zero) characters.

Keyboard pasted characters

When entering a search keyword, you may find it useful to copy it from another window, right-click in the text box, and select Paste.

Boolean operators

This feature lets you combine keywords with the Boolean operators to produce more relevant results:

Use a space character for Boolean AND.

Use either OR or or for Boolean OR.

Use a hyphen character (-) for NOT.

Auto complete

Auto-complete monitors what you are typing and, after typing the first few characters, displays a list of suggested words. If one of those words matches what you intended to type, you can select it from the list.

Highlighting

Search highlighting highlights the searched key words or phrase in the resulting documents.

Fuzzy search

Like a spelling corrector, a fuzzy search tries to correct misspelled search text and suggests corrected text.

Proximity search

Proximity search looks for documents where two or more word occurrences are at most ten words apart.

The proximity search operators are NEAR and FBY (meaning “followed by”). These operators can be entered in upper or lower case.

Synonym search

This feature suggests links to synonyms of the keyword.

Special characters

Special characters are not allowed in word search.

The search function does not return topics or index entries that contain special characters, such as the copyright symbol.

The backslash character (\) is not allowed inside a phrase.

Hypen

The search function does not return topics or index entries that contain a hyphen.

Common words

The search feature does not return common words such as a, an, and the.

Initials

The search function does not return topics or index entries that contain initials, such L.P..

Boolean searches

Boolean operator names must be entered in English.

The AND and OR Boolean operators cannot be combined in a search text.

NOT operators must be at the end of the search string.

Proximity searches

The proximity operators must be entered in English.