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

Administer > Database administration > Data persistence > IR Expert > How IR Expert evaluates documents for relevance > Operations on terms

Operations on terms

IR Expert enforces term operations on all queries run on the ITSMA Service Management database, enabling automatic indexing based on key terms. These include:

Lexical analysis: The process of converting an input stream of characters into a stream of words or tokens.
Stemming: The process of combining related words, based on the reduction of words to their common root, stem, or form.
Stop words: A list of words determined to have no indexing value, used to eliminate potential terms appearing in query statements. If a word from the stop list appears in a query, IR Expert ignores that word in the search.
Spelling correction: The automated process of verifying and correcting the spelling of query terms.

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