Search tips

You can use search to find documents, text in a document, applications, and people. Below are some recommendations for composing an effective search query.

Web-style Search syntax

The new default for searching a view is "web style" syntax. If your search query has several words, the documents returned will contain those words, but not necessarily in the order you specified. This is a change from the current Notes® syntax; to search exact terms, quotation marks are now needed.

To toggle to a Notes-style search for a particular query, you can prepend a forward slash(/) to the beginning of the query to switch off web-style syntax for the duration if that search.
To change the default setting from web style to notes style, choose File > Preferences and clickBasic Notes Client Configuration. Then, in the additional options list, select Use Notes (not web) query syntax in the view search bar

Note: Web-style search syntax is not applicable to Domain Search queries.

Be specific

Use words you think will be only in the documents you want. Searching for Siamese in a pets discussion usually gives you fewer results than cats, and they'll be closer to what you want.

Use double quotes to search for an exact phrase

"Cats are choosy eaters" finds that exact phrase. Single quotes do not work.

Learn a few basic operators

If the application is full-text indexed, there are certain words and characters called operators that Search reads as instructions rather than words. You may want to learn some basic operators such as OR, AND, or NOT and use them in searches.

Select "Use Word Variants" and "Fuzzy search"

These are selections available when you open the More section of the Search bar. They widen your search, making it more comprehensive. See the topic Use Word Variants. Once these are activated, you can try using base words, or parts of words - "pair" to find "pairing" or "pairs"; "?ray" to find "gray," "stray," or "bray."

Use different words with the same meaning

If, when searching for documents about cats, your results include fewer documents than expected, try "cats OR felines OR kittens." The OR operator finds documents containing any of these.

Keep an eye on the number of results you get back

The number of results show in the upper left corner of the Search bar. If you have too many or too few results, try reformulating your search.

If there are too many results, try using AND. If there are too few results, try OR.

cats OR dogs Returns documents with one or the other (returns more results)

cats AND dogs Returns documents with both (returns fewer results)

Use the "fill out example form" condition

This is a powerful way of doing a complicated full-text (non-Domain) search. You can specify to a high degree what documents you want returned. You do not need to fill in every field in the example form - blank fields match all documents. For best results, fill in only the one or two fields that are most specific to your search.

Note: If you want to limit your search to documents created with the form you use as an example, add a By Form condition and specify the same form. Otherwise, documents created with all forms in the application are searched.

Sorting results using view columns

This tip is for full-text search only. If you are used to sorting a view with the triangle icons at the top of each column, select either "show all documents" or "keep current order" as your sorting option in the More section of the Search bar.