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# Search and Retrieval

This section describes Knowledge Discovery features that allow you to retrieve data from your Knowledge Discovery system in different ways.

## Text Search

Knowledge Discovery text search allows you to find content in your index. You can use lots of different search methods to get the results that you want.

### Conceptual Matches

You can search with any piece of content, such as a sentence, paragraph, a page of text, the body of an email, a record that contains human-readable information, or the derived text from an audio or speech snippet. You can also use one or more document references (identifiers) as input. Knowledge Discovery returns references to conceptually related documents, ranked by relevance.

Knowledge Discovery can also use this process to generate automatic hyperlinks between pieces of content (see Hyperlinks and Suggestion)

### Advanced Keyword Search

You can use advanced search to match any term or phrase that appears in quotation marks in its exact form before stemming (reducing a term to its basic form).

### Boolean and Bracketed Boolean Search

Knowledge Discovery accepts simple or complex Boolean and bracketed Boolean expressions and returns a list of matching documents. You can form Boolean expressions using a set of Boolean and proximity operators.

`AND` | `XOR`/`EOR` | `WNEAR` | `BEFORE` | `DSENTENCE`
`NOT` | `NEAR` | `XNEAR` | `AFTER` | `PARAGRAPH`
`OR` | `DNEAR` | `YNEAR` | `SENTENCE` |

### Exact Phrase Search

You can search for exact phrases by putting quotation marks around a string of words. For example: “world market”.

### Field Restrictions

You can use simple field restrictions in query text to restrict results to documents that contain specific values in specific fields.

### FieldText Search

FieldText searches provide a wide range of field specifiers that you can use to query fields, restrict query results, or bias query result scores. These options provide more fine-grained and complex search options than the simple field restrictions, for example exact value matching, date matching, and numeric value restrictions such as 'less than' or 'greater than'.

### Fuzzy Search

If a search string is not quite accurate (for example, if it contains spelling mistakes), a fuzzy query returns results that contain words that are similar to the entered string.

### Proper Names Search

Knowledge Discovery can recognize names and treats them as a unit.

### Proximity Search

Knowledge Discovery can return documents in which specific terms occur within a specified proximity with a higher weighting.

### Soundex Keyword Search

If the spelling of a keyword is not quite accurate but is phonetically correct, a Soundex keyword search returns results that contain the keyword and phonetically similar keywords. This process uses a configurable Soundex algorithm.

### Synonym Search

A synonym query returns results that are conceptually similar to the query terms, or conceptually similar to the synonyms that are available for the query terms.

## Geospatial Search

Knowledge Discovery can search for documents based on a geographical location, which might be an exact point or a region. For example, you can include longitude and latitude with your content in Knowledge Discovery, and Knowledge Discovery can use this to find all content that has a location close to a particular place, or within a particular area. It can also use the distance from a location to boost the score of each document.

## Hyperlinks and Suggestion

Knowledge Discovery can automatically generate hyperlinks in real time by suggesting documents that are contextually similar to the current document. Suggestions allow you to recommend related articles, documents, affinity products or services, or media content that relates to textual content.

Knowledge Discovery can generate and insert these hyperlinks each time it retrieves a document, so that new documents can reference older documents, and archived documents can link to the latest news or material on the subject.

## Natural Language Question Answering

Knowledge Discovery can understand natural language questions and provide direct answers. Depending on how you configure and set up your knowledge corpus, Knowledge Discovery can answer questions by:

- providing a simple factual response (for example a name or number).

- providing a stock response by matching a similar question from a selection that you provide (such as an FAQ).

- providing a passage from a document that contains the answer.

## Conversations

You can use Knowledge Discovery natural language question answering to provide an automated chat bot to answer simple questions from your users. In conversations you can create and maintain context, so that when users ask a question, the answer is more likely to be relevant. The conversations also allow you to perform an action (such as ordering an item or booking a holiday).

## User MetaFields

Knowledge Discovery can perform operations on document fields at query time, and create a temporary field that contains the result, which you can use in other query operations. For example, you can use Knowledge Discovery to create a field that calculates the sum of two existing price fields in a document, and return results that have a total price higher or lower than a value you choose.

## View Documents

Knowledge Discovery uses File Content Extraction to convert documents into HTML format for convenient viewing in a Web browser. Knowledge Discovery can convert documents that it retrieves from a local directory, intranet, or Internet source. It can also retrieve the document in its original format to return to the user.

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Version 26.1 | Last updated January 2026

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Product: Knowledge Discovery Category Component 26.1

Topic Title: Search and Retrieval