How to use free text search:

The following expressions and symbols can be used in free text searches:

• AND / plus ‘+’
Example: hello and world
Example: hello + world
The search will return records with both ‘hello’ and ‘world’.
Note: If no expression or symbol is put between terms ‘AND’ is assumed. For example: ‘water sanitation’ is understood as ‘water AND sanitation’.


• OR / Vertical bar ‘|’
Example: hello or world
Example: hello | world
The search will return records with either ‘hello’ or ‘world’ or both ‘hello’ and ‘world’.


• NOT / Exclamation mark ‘!’ or minus ‘-’
Example: hello -world
Example: hello !world
Example: hello NOT world
The search will return records with the word ‘hello’, but not the word ‘world’.


• Double quote " "
Example: "hello world"
Document must be an exact phrase. They must contain the words 'hello' and 'world' adjacently in any field in a document.


• Round brackets ‘()’
Example: (hello|world) AND (sun|moon)
Document must contain either hello or world AND either sun or moon.

Example complex search: "hello world" -(text|symbol)
Document must contain the words 'hello' and 'world' adjacently in any field in a document, but not contain either 'text' or 'symbol'.

Note: It is not possible to use single words in combination with the negative expressions and symbols, such as ‘|’, ‘OR’, ‘NOT’, ‘-’, ‘!’. So a query that just contains ‘-hello’ would not be acceptable. It would be acceptable to put ‘world -hello’