Filter & Search

Search Box

The Search box in the toolbar is used both for filtering as well as searching. To place the cursor in the Search box, simply click in it or press the forward slash (/) key.

The text entered in the Search box (or in the Search field at the top of the Search Results page) is not case sensitive, so you never need to worry about capitals when filtering or searching. In fact, you can enter an “e” regardless of whether the word that you are looking for is written with an e, E, ē, Ē, ĕ, Ĕ, ė, Ė, ę, Ę, è, é, ê, or ë.

Filter

The text Filter functionality is used to reduce the number of records in a view until you have found the record or records that you are looking for.

You can use the Search box to filter the records that are listed in the view that is presented on the left side of your screen. To do this, simply enter some characters in the Search box, without pressing Enter. As soon as you start typing, rows that do not contain a word that starts with these characters will be removed from the view.

The Filter functionality will require multiple words in a row to match when spaces are included in the Search box between characters. The order of these words does not affect the result.

Search

The Search functionality is used to look up records of any type that meet the conditions entered in the Search box. Where the Filter functionality starts as soon as characters are typed into the Search box, the Search functionality is activated only when some text has been entered and the Enter key is pressed. After the Enter key has been pressed, the Search Results page will be displayed. Note that if you hold down the Ctrl key when you press the Enter key, the Search Results page will be opened in a new browser tab. This is useful when you want to retain the information displayed in the current browser tab.

The search results are listed on this page in such a way that the most relevant record is listed on top. The relevance of a record is automatically calculated. A record is considered more relevant when the keywords occur in its ID, Name or Subject fields, rather than in its other fields. The relevance of a record increases when the keywords occur multiple times in a record. The relevance of a record also increases a little when a keyword is found within one of its links to another record.

The most important factor that influences relevance, however, is the type of record that was listed in the view when the search was executed. Because of this, it is likely that requests will be listed at the top of the search results when the search was executed from a view that lists requests. If you were instead looking at a view that lists workflows, then it is likely that workflows are listed at the top of the Search Results page.

When the search results are displayed, you are able to refine these results. The options for this are shown when the Refine Search button, which is located to the right of the large Search field, is pressed. Changing the default sort order from “Relevance” to “Last Updated” or “Created” ensures that the most recently updated or created record within the results is listed on top. If you have access to multiple accounts, you will be able to check the boxes in front of the account names to limit your search results to records of those accounts. Similarly, you can limit the search results to specific record types by checking the record types that you would like to include.

In addition, you can use the following special operators when you perform a search:

OR Operator ( | )

The default behavior of the Search functionality is to consider all words in a search. If you want to specifically allow any one of several words, you can use the OR operator.

The example below shows a search that will give you records that contain the word “email” or “outlook” or both:

email | outlook

NOT Operator ( – )

To exclude terms from your search, you can place a minus sign immediately before a word to indicate that you do not want records that contain this word to appear in your search results. The minus sign should appear immediately before the word and should be preceded with a space. This ensures that the hyphen in words such as “e-mail” or “anti-virus” will not be interpreted as an exclusion symbol. You can also use an exclamation mark as the NOT operator.

Example:

email -outlook -exchange

Note that a search query should always contain at least one keyword that you do want the search engine to look for; it cannot be made up solely of terms that should be excluded.

Phrase Search ( " " )

By putting double quotes around a set of words, you are telling the Search functionality to consider the exact words in that exact order without any change.

Example:

"Exchange Server 2007 SP1"

Proximity Operator ( ~ )

If you are interested in records that contain specific words, but only when these words appear close together, you can use the proximity operator.

The example below shows a search that will only give you records that contain all three keywords in a field, regardless of the order in which they appear, provided that there are no more than five words between the first and the last word of the span that contains all three keywords:

"ibm server unix"~5

Prefix Operator ( * )

If you know the first characters of a word, you can use the prefix operator.

The example below shows a search for words that start with ‘Servic’. It might return records that contain terms such as ‘Service Level Agreement’ and ‘Servicing’.

"Servic*"

Precedence Operator ( )

By putting parentheses around operators, the order of execution of these operators can be overridden. The following example finds records containing both service and manage (or management, manager), but excludes records containing the word SLA.

Example:

"(service AND manage*) NOT SLA"