348 IBM Content Manager OnDemand Guide
15.6.1  Syntax
The FTS Server supports a rich query language that enables fuzzy searches, proximity 
searches, weighted searches, and Boolean searches.
Queries can contain terms and operators. A term is a single word, such as “united”. A phrase 
is a group of words that are contained in quotation marks, such as “computer software”. 
Phrases are searched as exact expressions. Stop words are not removed. No lemmatization 
is performed. Boolean operators, such as AND, or wildcards, such as asterisk (*) or question 
mark (?), are treated as literal characters.
Without quotation marks, the query is parsed and the syntactical options that are described in 
the following sections are allowed.
15.6.2  Boolean searches
Boolean operators allow terms to be combined through logical operators. The following 
Boolean operators are supported: AND, OR, NOT, and the minus sign (-).
Boolean operators must be specified in all uppercase characters. For example, when you 
search for documents about dogs or cats while you specify the OR Boolean operator, specify 
the query as dogs OR cats, not dogs or cats.
Precede a term with a minus sign (-) to indicate that the term must be absent from a 
document for a match to occur. For example, the following query returns documents that 
include the term computer and not the term hardware:
computer -hardware
Use parentheses to control the Boolean logic in a query. For example, the following query 
finds documents that contain either WebSphere or IBM Lotus and website:
(WebSphere OR Lotus) AND website
15.6.3  Wildcard searches and optional terms
FTS supports wildcard searches. Y ou can place wildcard characters before, within, or after a 
term.
Use a question mark (?) to perform a single character wildcard search. For example, the 
following query finds documents that contain the terms mare, mere, mire, and more:
m?re
Use an asterisk (*) to perform a multiple character wildcard search. A multiple character 
wildcard search looks for zero or more alphanumeric characters.The following query finds 
documents that contain the terms bar, rebar, far, afar, and car:
*ar
Use a percent sign (%) to indicate that a search term is optional. For example, the following 
query finds documents that include the term log and optionally include the term file:
log %file