Search Query Logic
- Applies to:
- All MindTouch Versions
- Role required:
- N/A
Overview
Whatever you enter into the search bar is analyzed, and your query is not taken literally. Instead, Search considers the following:
- Stemming
- Stop words
- Language
- Double quotes
- Underscores
Stemming
Search determines appropriate variations of a word in the search query. For example, the word cats is stemmed as cat, and will return results containing cat, cats, and catamaran. Stemming would not return results for the word scattering because the stem is compared against the beginning of a word.
Stemming does not apply to Tags.
Stop words
Search does not index commonly used words and prepositions, such as a, an, to, from, or the. This would clutter search results.
Language
Words are stemmed based on your site's language, and Expert accounts for special characters in languages like German, Russian, or Spanish.
Double quotes
When you search a query with multiple words without double quotes, each word is searched individually. Because of this, some results may rank highly despite not including all of the words in your query.
You should put double quotes around phrases if you want to search for the whole phrase, instead of individual words.
Underscores
If your search query contains words separated by underscores, Search will find files that match any word in the query, but only pages that contain exact matches to the query.
Read more about how to perform advanced searches.