Indexing Service Query Language

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.

 

New in Indexing Service 3.0 is the extensible Dialect 2 of the Indexing Service query language. Its short form contains as a subset — with a few incompatibilities — the syntax of the original Indexing Service query language, now called Dialect 1. Except for the few incompatibilities, Dialect 2 processes queries written in both its long form and its short form (Dialect 1 subset). Most applications and scripts will specify Indexing Service query language queries in Dialect 2. For compatibility with earlier releases, applications and scripts can submit a query written in Dialect 1 and specify that Indexing Service process it as a Dialect 1 query. An alternative to the Indexing Service query language is the SQL query language.

This section describes several features of the Indexing Service query language. It consists of the following topics.

• Query Submittal for Indexing Service Query Language
• Query Syntax of Indexing Service Query Language
• Content Queries
• CONTAINS Operator
• Boolean and Proximity Operators
• Property-Value Queries
• Relational Queries
• Pattern-Matching Queries
• Term Weighting
• Vector-Space Queries
• Incompatibilities of Dialect 2 with Dialect 1

For a reference to the Indexing Service query language, see Query-Language Dialects.