FactFinder Search syntax

The search server supports a specific syntax that allows you to get more specialised search results.

Exact Search

If something should be searched for exactly (such as an article number), a plus sign can be placed before the term. If it is a phrase, it must be placed in quotation marks.

Excluding terms

If a term is preceded by a minus sign, results that contain it will be excluded from the search result.

Question marks (?) and asterisk characters (*) are supported. The question mark stands for a single character, the asterisk for an arbitrary number of characters. When the search term contains a wildcard the search server’s error tolerance algorithms are no longer applied.

You cannot combine minus, plus or phrase characters wild card characters in one single word (for example, “+exact*” will not work). But you can combine different words with different control characters: such as in “+exact -exclude sea*term”. You also cannot use wildcards inside quotation marks. Quotation marks mean ‘exactly this form’, wildcards cannot be interpreted as such.

Be careful when using wild cards. You lose fault tolerance when using wild cards. Once the search term contains at least one wild card char, the whole search term is search for exactly. Example “search” and “term” are searched fault tolerant:

Combining

It is possible to combine two search terms with a Boolean OR operator. The symbol for this operator is two bars: ||. This is often used in combination with exact searches.