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Site Search Engine

The Verity search engine on your site has some powerful capabilities to find variations on words and phrases, and to use wildcards. It's a good idea to include a "search tips" page on your site and link to it from your results page.

Words, Phrases and Word Variations

Unlike many web search engines, several words with spaces between them are interpreted as a phrase.  To search for several words appearing separately, insert a comma between each word.  Verity also searches automatically for variations on the words you enter -- known as "stemming".

Example Search result

low,brass,instrument

low or brass or instrument

low brass instrument

the phrase: low brass instrument

film

film, films, filming, or filmed


Using AND, OR and NOT

You can use AND, OR and NOT to give the search engine more specific instructions on which word combinations you're looking for.  If you use combinations of these operators, you might want to use parentheses to specify how they're to be interpreted. 

Example Search result

filming AND fun

film, films, filming, or filmed, and fun

filming OR fun

film, films, filming, or filmed, or fun

filming NOT fun

film, films, filming, or filmed, but not fun

"filming and fun"

the phrase: filming and fun

filming OR fun AND camera

filming, or the combination of fun and camera

filming OR (filming AND camera)

filming, or the combination of fun and camera

(filming OR fun) AND camera

either filming or fun, and camera

filming OR fun NOT camera

either filming or fun, but not camera

Using Wildcards

A question mark (?) matches any single alphanumeric character, while an asterisk (*) matches zero or more alphanumeric characters. Avoid using the asterisk as the first character in a search string.

Example Search result

apple?

apples or applet

app*ed

Appleseed, applied, appropriated, and so on.

If you need to search for a wildcard character itself (as a literal), place a backslash character before it; for example:

  • To match a question mark or other wildcard character, precede the ? with one backslash. For example, type the following in a search form: Checkers\?
  • To match a literal asterisk, you precede the * with two backslashes, and enclose the search term with either single or double quotation marks. For example, type the following in a search form: 'M\\*' (or "M\\*")