Enterprise Search
There are a number of ways to improve the quality of the results returned from your searches. Listed below are some useful techniques that you can use. Like many other search engines SharePoint provides a number of operators, which may be combined to provide complex search queries.
| Wildcards | You can use the wildcard operator (*) for prefix matching. This example will return results for print, printer, and printing. | | Print*
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| Phrases | Use the phrase format if you know two or more words. Surround the phrase with double quotation marks. | | "Graduate Research School" |
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| File Type | To bring back documents of a specific file type use the filetype operator. | | filetype:docx |
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| File Name | If you know the name of the document you can use the filename operator | | filename:policy.docx |
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| Title | As well as a file name every document should have a readable title. | | title:"Student Engagement Report"
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| Author | To return documents written by a particular person use the author operator. The format is "surname, first name"
| | author:"bloggs, joe" |
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| Path | To restrict your search to a particular area use the path operator
| | path:http://extra.tees.ac.uk |
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| Excluding content | Include a minus sign to return results that do not contain an expression. | | database
-"policy" |
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| AND | Use AND when the results must contain all the query expressions. | | service
AND management |
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