Finding help content

The help search is a full-text search that supports exact phrases, word stems (in English and German), wildcard characters, and Boolean operators. You can control whether search results are highlighted and how they are displayed in the Search Results list.

About this task

Note: Search strings are not case-sensitive. The search results are the same for open, Open, OPEN, and "OpEn".

Procedure

  1. Enter terms in the Search field, and click GO. The Search Results view displays the top results, which are sorted by relevance.
  2. Select a search result to read the corresponding topic. The page automatically scrolls to the first occurrence of the search term.
  3. You can change how search results are displayed:
    1. To turn term highlighting on and off, click Highlight Search Terms Highlight search terms
    2. To hide or show the result descriptions (the first several words in the topic), click Show Result DescriptionsShow result descriptions
    3. To sort the results by criteria other than search relevance, click Show Result CategoriesGroup search result. Sorting options available vary from product to product.
  4. To toggle between the Contents view and the Search Results view, click the Contents tab (Table of Contents tab) or the Search Results tab (Search results tab). The Search Results view displays the topics that meet the search query.
  5. If your initial search produces too many or too few hits to find what you are looking for, refine your search using these techniques:
    1. If you are confident that the information for which you are searching is in a particular branch of the navigation tree, select the topic at the top of the branch, click Search Topics Search topics and select Search this topic and all subtopics.
    2. Use a longer, more specific phrase to bring more relevant topics to the top of the results list.
    3. Enclose a phrase in quotation marks (" ") to find only those topics that contain that exact phrase. The case is still ignored.
    4. (English and German only): Enclose a term in quotation marks to eliminate word-stem results. For example, without quotation marks, the search term challenge produces hits for challenging and challenged. Change the search term to "challenge" to eliminate hits to the other words based on the same stem.
    5. Use a wildcard character:
      • Asterisk (*): For multiple unknown or variable characters in the term. For example, the search term par* returns partly, participate, partial, and other words that begin with par.
      • Question mark (?): For a single unknown or variable character or zero character in the term. For example, the search term par? returns part and park but not partial or partly.
    6. Use Boolean operators:
      • AND: Narrows the search to include topics that contain both terms. For example, if you enterdatabase AND "log file", the search results include topics that contain both the term database and the phrase Logfile.
      • OR: Widens the search to include topics that contain either one term or another. For example, if you enter database OR "log file" , the search results include topics that contain either database or log file.
      • NOT: Searches for topics that do not contain a term or phrase. For example, if you enter database NOT "log file", the search results include topics that contain database but do not contain log file.
      • OR...NOT: Searches for topics that contain either of two terms but do not contain another term. For example, if you enter database OR "data base" NOT "log file", the search results include topics that contain either database or data base but that do not contain log file.

What to do next

If the search still returns too many results, consider narrowing the search to a subset of topics.

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