Searching IBM Support

Search IBM support

To search IBM Support, enter your search text into the Search support box on the IBM support page (see Figure 1, callout 2) or in the header of most other pages on the Support site, and then click the Search icon or press Enter.

Search results include a list of links to technical support documentation and known issues that contain at least one of your search terms. Documents that contain all of your terms are ranked higher than documents that contain only some of your terms. 

Figure 2. Search results

Use the results page's filters to narrow your search results, and then select Apply Filters. You can filter by: 

• Product documentation
• Known issues

Search Tips

To get the most relevant search results, use these tips for creating meaningful search terms and getting the most out of the results:

Simple searches

• The search terms you enter are matched against the title, URL, keywords and content of support pages, and known issues.
• The search finds singular, plural, and related forms of many words.
• The search is not case-sensitive, so ibm and IBM return the same results.

The most relevant pages display at the top of your results list. If your language is something other than English, results in that language are shown before English results. You can change the sorting order on the results page.

A password icon that precedes a link indicates that registration is required to view that page. After you select the link, you will be prompted for your IBM ID and password, or you will be given the opportunity to register.

Creating effective searches

To improve the relevance of your search results, try these best practices:

• Be specific. Use terms that are unique, OR add descriptive terms. For example, a search for DB2 might return too many results. If you are looking for information on DB2 UDB, enter:

  db2 udb or db2 udb linux.

• Use quotation marks. Enclose all or part of your search terms in quotation marks to search for that exact term. For example, use "SPSS Amos" (including the quotation marks) to find information that contains the exact phrase SPSS Amos. Without quotes, the site searches for SPSS and Amos separately.
• Use synonyms. If you get too few results OR do not find what you are looking for, try synonyms for your original terms. For example, if you are looking for education opportunities, instead of searching for java classes, which could imply either education or a file type, try java training.
• Check your spelling. A single misspelled or incorrectly typed term can affect your results.
• Learn from your results. Your search might not return exactly what you are looking for, but scanning the results can help you see the words that were found and give you ideas for other searches. Adding specific terms can narrow your results.

• Take control of multiple search terms. Normally, the search engine finds results that contain all of your terms as well as results that contain any of your terms, and then ranks these results by relevance. To gain more control over your search, use the AND and OR operators between terms. For example:

  • To search for results that include db2 community edition or db2 enterprise edition, enter:
    db2 (community OR enterprise) edition
    Note: the parentheses are needed because the space (default) operator normally takes precedence over the OR operator. Without the parentheses, the search query would be interpreted as (db2 community) OR enterprise.
  • To search only for results that include all the terms, enter:
    db2 AND community AND enterprise AND edition.
• Exclude terms in a search. To exclude terms from a search and narrow your results, use the minus sign (-) before the term. Do not enter any space between the minus sign and the term, but do enter a space between search terms. For example, enter:

  bladecenter AND accessories -monitor.

  The results contain documents with bladecenter and accessories, but not the word monitor.

No results

If you obtain no results for your search terms, try different keywords and use the above tips to create another search.