Evidence Operators

Evidence operators can be used to specify either a basic word search or an intelligent word search. A basic word search finds documents that contain only the word or words specified in the query. An intelligent word search expands the query terms to create an expanded word list so that the search returns documents that contain variations of the query terms. For example, the THESAURUS operator selects documents containing the word specified, as well as its synonyms.

Documents retrieved using evidence operators are not relevance-ranked unless you use the MANY modifier. The following table describes each evidence operator.

Operator name Description
WORD Performs a basic word search, selecting documents that include one or more instances of the specific word you entered.
STEM Expands the search to include the word you entered and its variations.
THESAURUS Expands the search to include the word you entered and its synonyms.
WILDCARD Matches wildcard characters included in search strings. Certain characters automatically indicate a wildcard specification.
SOUNDEX Expands the search to include the word you enter and one or more words that "sound like", or whose letter pattern is similar to, the word specified. Collections do not have sound-alike indexes by default; to use this feature sound-alike indexes must be built.
TYPO/N Expands the search to include the word you enter plus words that are similar to the query term. This operator performs "approximate pattern matching" to identify similar words.