Evidence operators expand a search word into a list of related
words that are then searched for as well. When you perform a search
using an evidence operator, documents containing one or more occurrences
of the words in the expanded word list are documents containing
the word specified, as well as its synonyms. Documents retrieved
using evidence operators are not relevance-ranked unless you use
the MANY modifier. See “MANY modifier”. Table 8-1 describes each
evidence operator.
Table 8-1: Evidence operators
Operator name
|
Description
|
|---|
WORD
|
Selects documents that include one or
more instances of a word you specify.
|
STEM
|
Selects documents that include one or
more variations of the search word you specify.
|
THESAURUS
|
Selects documents that contain one or
more synonyms of the word you specify.
|
WILDCARD
|
Selects documents that contain matches
to a character string containing variables.
|
SOUNDEX
|
Selects documents that include one or
more words that “sound like,” or whose letter
pattern is similar to, the word specified.
|
NEAR/N
|
Expands the search to include the word
you enter plus words that are similar to the query term. This operator
performs “approximate pattern matching” to identify
similar words.
|
