Global Relay - Advanced Search
Using Advanced Search Techniques
With advanced search techniques, you can perform the following:
Boolean searches
Wildcard searches
Phrase searches
Proximity searches
Performing Boolean Searches: AND/OR/NOT
To search for words and phrases in the same message based on their relationship to each other, you can use the Boolean operators AND, OR and NOT. You can also use parentheses to establish precedence when using multiple operators in a search.
NOTE: Boolean operators must be capitalized when you use them.
Operator
Description
Sample
AND
To search for messages that contain two words or two phrases somewhere within the message, use the AND operator. AND is the default operator in phrase searches. To reduce the number of search results, use AND.
Investment AND guarantee Investment AND success
OR
To search for messages that contain at least one of two words/phrases within the message, use the OR operator.
Where an AND search returns messages containing both terms, an OR search returns more results because it finds messages that contain either or both terms.
Investment OR guarantee Investment OR “can’t fail”
NOT
To search for messages that contain a specific word or phrase, but do not contain another word or phrase, use the NOT operator before the term you want to exclude.
guarantee NOT guaranteed guarantee NOT success
( )
You can use more than one Boolean operator in a search and control the precedence of each operator using parentheses ( ) around an important set of search criteria.
(foolproof OR certain) AND broker
Performing Wildcard Searches: ? or *
To search for multiple variations of a word, use a wildcard search. Wildcard searches are invaluable when you know only part of the search criteria. There are two types of wildcard searches supported: single character wildcard and multiple character wildcard.
NOTE: Wildcard characters * and ? cannot be used as the first character of a search.
Using a Single Character Wildcard: ?
To find similar words that only differ by a letter, put a question mark ? in place of that one letter. For example, to find the words “text” and “test” enter te?t
Using a Multiple Character Wildcard: *
To find similar words that differ by more than one letter, place an asterisk at the point where the words start to differ, e.g. to find the words “trade” and “trading” enter trad*
Understanding the Restrictions of Wildcard Searches
You can use both kinds of wildcard characters within a word or at the end of a word; you cannot use them at the beginning of a word.
Filenames and extensions are considered two words, so entering testfile*txt will not return testfile.txt.
NOTE: You cannot use wildcard characters within a phrase search.
Performing Phrase Searches
To search for a specific phrase or series of words, place double quotation marks (“”) around that phrase; otherwise, your search will return all instances of those words independently and as a phrase.
For example, to find the phrase “confidential agreement”, you must enter “confidential agreement” with the quotation marks; otherwise, your results will contain all messages with the word “confidential” and all messages with the word “agreement”.
Performing Proximity Searches: ~
You can search for words based on how close they are to each other. Proximity searches are ideal when words have a relationship to each other, but are not always side-by-side.
For instance, the words “investment” and “fail” have a distinct meaning when close to each other: “This investment cannot fail” or “This investment in the swamplands cannot fail.”
To perform a proximity search to find “investment” and “fail” within a specific number of words of each other, start with a phrase search, add the tilde symbol ~ and enter a number for the range for the words separating the terms in your phrase.
For example, to find all instances of “investment” and “fail” within 10 words of each other, enter
“investment fail”~10
NOTE: You cannot use wildcard characters within a proximity search.