From the Search page, you can search across all of the documents that have been indexed in Sybase Search. Various options are provided to help you get accurate search results.
To search across documents:
From the Search page, enter appropriate values for the following fields and click Search:
Specifying search terms – you can specify the terms that are to be included or excluded from the search criteria.
Search Terms – enter a natural-language query in the Search Terms field. The more information you provide, the more accurate your results are. For more information, see “Optimizing search strategies”.
Not Terms – enter terms to indicate concepts dissimilar to those for which you are searching. Unlike the Boolean NOT operator, documents that contain the Not Terms are considered for retrieval. However, the number of Not Terms a document contains is considered by the scoring algorithm, and its relevance score is downgraded accordingly based on the weight of the Not Terms it contains.For example, a search for “operating systems” with Not Terms “Windows XP” would not discount a document for containing the phrase “opens in a new window.”
Selecting categories – categories are a set of documents grouped by content, independent of location or type of document store. You can use categories to filter search results. You can also view lists of documents for each category. For more information, see “Categorizing documents”.
Selecting document groups – limit your search to one or more predefined document groups by selecting specific groups from the Document Groups list. Only documents from the chosen document groups are included in the search results.
Specifying metadata – select from a list of predefined metadata parameters to include metadata in the search. Sybase Search supports text, integer, and date metadata types.
Some metadata parameters are document-specific. For example,
a Microsoft Word document can have a Word Count, whereas a plain
text document cannot and an HTML document most likely does not.
Metadata parameters that are guaranteed to be searchable for all
documents are described as being reliable. When the parameter searched
on is not supported or not present in a document, it is automatically
excluded from the results.
You select an operator for each metadata parameter. All metadata types support the equal to (=) operator. The integer and date types also support greater than or equal to(>=) and the less than or equal to (<=) operators.
You also enter a value for each metadata field that you define.
The values for text types are processed as search text. In other
words, search terms are stemmed and augmented through synonyms and acronyms
(except file path fields). The numeric type values are numbers and
the date type values should be in the format configured by the Sybase Search system
administrator, for example, dd/mm/yyyy.
Fore more details, see “Configuring parsers to query metadata fields”. Table 6-1 lists the predefined metadata
parameters and types.
Name |
Type |
Reliable |
|---|---|---|
Author |
TEXT |
No |
Character Count |
INT |
No |
Client |
TEXT |
No |
Comment |
TEXT |
No |
Company |
TEXT |
No |
Creation Date |
TEXT |
No |
Description |
TEXT |
No |
Document Name |
TEXT |
Yes |
Document Path |
TEXT |
Yes |
Document Size (KB) |
INT |
Yes |
Document Type |
TEXT |
No |
Editor |
TEXT |
No |
File Type |
TEXT |
Yes |
Keywords |
TEXT |
No |
Language |
TEXT |
No |
Last Modified |
DATE |
Yes |
Page Count |
INT |
No |
Project |
TEXT |
No |
Publisher |
TEXT |
No |
Reference |
TEXT |
No |
Second Author |
TEXT |
No |
Status |
TEXT |
No |
Subject |
TEXT |
No |
Title |
TEXT |
No |
URL |
TEXT |
No |
Word Count |
INT |
No |
Metadata Combination Operators – you can select two combination operators:
Within Expression – use when there is at least one metadata parameter with a value that consists of more than one term. When you set the operator to AND, every term must be present in the document metadata for the match to succeed. When you set the operator to OR, only one of the terms must be present in the document metadata for the match to succeed.
For example, when the metadata parameter is Author = “John Smith”,
the Within Expression operator differentiates the two possible interpretations,
which are Author = “John AND Smith” or Author = “John
OR Smith”.
Sybase Search supports only one Within Expression operator, so
you cannot perform a metadata search for Author = “John
AND (Smith OR Roberts)”. However, Sybase Search processes
each Equals expression individually; therefore, you can achieve
the same effect by using two separate expressions and using the OR Within Expression
operator and the AND Across Expression operator.
For example, Author = “John” AND
Author = “Smith, Roberts” returns
documents only authored by John Smith or John Roberts.
Across Expressions – use when you have defined at least two metadata parameters. When you set the operator to AND, both metadata parameters must succeed for the match to succeed. When you set the operator to OR, only one of the metadata parameters must succeed.
For example, when the metadata parameters are Author = “Smith,” Title = “Algebra,” the
Across Expressions operator differentiates the two possible interpretations
as:
Author = “Smith” AND
Title = “Algebra”
Author = “Smith” OR
Title = “Algebra”
Sybase Search supports only one Across Expressions operator, so
you cannot perform a metadata search for multiple Across Expressions
operators.
The predefined metadata parameters are primarily to be used in conjunction with the Search Term and Not Term search criteria to refine the search, but you can also use them independently for a metadata search. Search results from a pure metadata search have no meaningful relevance scores.
Setting result options – you can further refine search results by defining values for the following options from the Result Options tab:
Minimum Document Relevance – define the minimum relevance ranking that a document must score for it to be included within the search results. Documents with scores lower than the percentage that you enter are not returned.
Number of Results – define the number of document results to display for each page by selecting a value from the Number of Results list.
Number of Paragraphs – define the number of document paragraphs to display for each result document by selecting a value from the Number of Paragraphs list.
Score Unknown Terms – include unknown terms by selecting the Score Unknown Terms check box. When selected, terms unknown to the system (and therefore, do not exist in any indexed document) are considered by the scoring algorithm.
Term Highlighting – specify whether to highlight terms in the search results by selecting the Term Highlighting check box. When selected, terms from the query are highlighted in the result paragraphs and in the plain-text versions of the matching documents, as shown by the view text links.
