Search for	Example	Results
A single word	`cat`	Topics that contain the word "cat". You will also find its grammatical variations, such as "cats".
A phrase. You can specify that the search results contain a specific phrase.	`"cat food"` (quotation marks)	Topics that contain the literal phrase "cat food" and all its grammatical variations. Without the quotation marks, the query is equivalent to specifying an OR operator, which finds topics with one of the individual words instead of the phrase.

Search for	Operator	Example
Two or more words in the same topic	`AND` `and` `+` (plus symbol) `&` (ampersand)	`cat AND dog` `"cat food"+milk` `"cat food"&"dog food"`
Either word in a topic	`OR` `or` `\|` (pipe)	`cat OR dog` `cat \| dog`
Topics that do not contain a specific word or phrase	`NOT` `not` `!` (exclamation point)	`NOT cat` `! dog`
Topics that contain one string and do not contain another	`^` (caret)	`cat ^ mouse`
A combination of search types	`( )` parentheses	`cat + (dog \| mouse)` `cat \| dog + (! mouse)`

Service Management2017.11

Lexical analysis

Symbol	Description
Digits	Numbers do not make good index terms, and are not usually included as tokens. In some instances, query statements consist of only digits, such as a record number. Therefore, IR Expert indexes digits along with alphabetic characters.
Hyphens	Words broken at the end of lines, or including hyphens, can result in multiple word fragment tokens. IR Expert considers hyphenated terms as a single token and does not break them apart.
Other punctuation	Other punctuation, including periods (.), commas (,), and underscores (_) are often used as parts of terms. IR Expert allows apostrophes (’), dashes (-), and periods (.) to appear within, but not at the beginning or end of a token.
Case	Case distinctions are important in some cases, such as programming languages. IR Expert is case-insensitive. It converts all ITSMA Service Management database terms to lower case.