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Other Usage Rules

Note

Indexing Service is no longer supported as of Windows XP and is unavailable for use as of Windows 8. Instead, use Windows Search for client side search and Microsoft Search Server Express for server side search.

 

The following rules also apply to the use of the Boolean and proximity operators.

  • Use double quotes (") to indicate that a Boolean or proximity operator keyword should be ignored in your query. For example, "Jack and Jill" will match documents with that exact phrase, not documents that match the Boolean expression. (In addition to being an operator, the word and is a noise word in English.)
  • The NEAR operator is similar to the AND operator in that NEAR returns a match if both words being sought are in the same document. However, the NEAR operator differs from AND because the rank assigned by NEAR depends on the proximity of words. That is, the rank of a document in which the sought words are closer together is higher than or equal to the rank of a document in which the words are farther apart. If these words are more than 50 words apart, they are not considered near enough to be related, and the document is assigned a rank of zero.
  • The NOT operator can be used only after an AND operator in content (text-type) queries; it can be used only to exclude documents that match a previous content restriction. For value-type property queries, the NOT operator can be used apart from the AND operator.
  • The symbols (&, |, !, ~) and the English keywords AND, OR, NOT, and NEAR work the same way in all languages supported by Indexing Service.
  • The NEAR operator can be applied only to words or phrases.