File Analysis Suite 3.7.0 Analyze Help Center

# Keyword search syntax

Filtering by a keyword search narrows the resulting set of items. You can combine a keyword search with a filter search. Each separate filter type that you select is added to the initial keyword search with the AND expression.

Keyword searches return exact matches for single terms and are not case sensitive; therefore, a search for bankruptcy will not return bankrupt but may also retrieve the word Bankruptcy.

Phrase searches

In a phrase search, you search for a set of two or more words that must appear exactly as you enter them in your query.

Define your phrase by enclosing it within quotation marks, for example: “company declared bankruptcy”.

Example | Description
--- | ---
company declared bankruptcy | The search engine interprets this query as: company OR declared OR bankruptcy and returns documents that may have only one or two of those terms, as well as documents that possess all three terms, in any order.
“company declared bankruptcy” | Only documents that include this exact phrase are retrieved.

It is important to remember that, in a phrase search, File Analysis Suite does not return documents that include any variation on the phrase, no matter how slight. That means in the above search, none of the documents below would be retrieved:

- documents containing all three words in a different order (declared bankruptcy company)

- documents containing all three words in the right order, but not consecutively (company initially declared bankruptcy)

- documents containing a typographical error in the phrase (company declared bankrupcy)

NOTE: Phrase searches are not case sensitive.

Phrase search exceptions

Querying for a phrase that contains a stop word is the primary exception to the “exactness” of phrase searches. The search engine cannot find and retrieve any precise phrase if it contains any stop words.

For example, you may want to search for the phrase “ham on rye”. On is a stop word, so the search engine instead interprets this phrase as “ham rye” and only returns documents that contain the exact phrase “ham rye”.

Deleting the quotation marks (so that the words are no longer considered a phrase) may return unexpected results. For example, when searching for ham on rye without the quotation marks, the search engine ignores the stop word, interprets your query as ham rye, and uses the default operator OR. The resulting search for ham OR rye returns three document sets:

- all documents that contain ham

- all documents that contain rye

- all documents that contain both terms

The retrieved documents may not include the terms ham and rye either close together or in the desired context (for example, “After watching his performance in ‘The Catcher in the Rye,’ the audience was convinced he was a real ham.”).

Use advanced search techniques to search for phrases that contain stop words. Using the previous example, here are some possibilities:

- ham NEAR2 rye. A low-proximity search returns all documents that contain the words ham and rye within two words of each other.
- ham AND rye. A simple Boolean query may return some false positives, such as the Catcher in the Rye example cited above
- ham AND rye AND mustard. Use a third word whose presence in a document might imply the presence of the other two.

- ham AND rye NOT vegetarian. Use a third word whose presence in a document might indicate that the document is not desirable.

  NOTE: You cannot include more than 20 search terms in a single phrase search.

Punctuation and non-alphanumeric characters in phrase searches

Do not include any punctuation or non-alphanumeric characters in your phrase search, with three exceptions:

- Phrases that contain a period (.).

- Phrases that contain an underscore (_).

- Phrases that contain an “at” symbol (@).

You cannot search for a phrase such as “blue-green algae” or “blue, green algae”, but you can use a phrase search for most email addresses, such as babe_ruth@yankees.com.

To search for a complete email address, enter the address in the Sender or Recipient field, and File Analysis Suite returns all appropriate email messages sent to (or from) the address.

Boolean searches

You can use standard Boolean queries in File Analysis Suite.

NOTE: You must specify all search operators using capital letters.

The following operators allow you to manipulate a query by applying them to words, exact phrases or other Boolean expressions.

Boolean operators
Operator | Description | Example
--- | --- | ---
AND | Binary operator. Both terms must match in every document that returns. | offshore AND account This query returns only documents that contain both offshore and account.
OR | Binary operator. One or both terms must appear for the document to return. This option is the default behavior if you do not specify an operator between two terms. | bankruptcy OR litigation This query returns documents that contain bankruptcy, litigation, or both terms.
NOT | Excludes the term that follows NOT from all of the returned documents. | body NOT library This query returns only documents that contain body but not library. NOTE: To use NOT to exclude multiple terms, you must use brackets. Otherwise, NOT applies only to the term that immediately follows it. To use NOT to exclude a phrase, you must put the phrase in quotation marks
( ) | Using parenthetical expressions dictates the precedence and behavior of combined operator statements. (These are evaluated left to right and can be nested.) | (mutual OR distant) AND (funds OR friends) This query returns documents that contain one of these: mutual and funds mutual and friends distant and funds distant and friends

Group searches

Group searches use parentheses to clarify a query by grouping two or more search terms together.

Always use a group search when:

- you have three or more search terms.

- you are using OR with AND or NOT.

  Use parentheses in complex queries to ensure that you receive the most accurate results. For example, you may want to find all documents that contain Moe, Larry, and either Curly or Schemp. Phrasing your query this way:

  Moe AND Larry AND Curly OR Schemp

  returns these document sets:

  - Documents that contain Moe and Larry and Curly

  - Documents that contain Schemp. These documents may or may not contain any of the other three names, because Schemp is the only search parameter the search engine recognizes in this portion of the query.

If you use parentheses to isolate the OR phrase—Moe AND Larry AND (Curly OR Schemp)—you receive two sets of documents:

- Documents that contain Moe and Larry and Curly
- Documents that contain Moe and Larry and Schemp

Proximity searches

You can apply the following operators to words, exact phrases or other Boolean expressions to run a proximity search.

Operator | Description | Example
--- | --- | ---
NEARN | The terms must occur within N words of each other. | fish NEAR3 chips Matches "fish and chips" and "chips and freshly caught fish", but not "fish is sometimes battered and fried, and served with chips".

Wildcard searches

The wild card characters (* and ?) are supported.

The ? symbol replaces a single character. The * symbol replaces zero, one, or more characters.

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Version 3.7.0 | Last updated May 2022
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Product: File Analysis Suite 3.7.0

Topic Title: Keyword search syntax

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