Text Searching is one the most underutilized features in Worldox. This is primarily because many users were never taught about the “rules of searching” or about Boolean operators. Here is a quick summary that can serve as a cheat sheet:
“AND” Searches: Worldox supports the logical AND operator. Joining terms with AND results in any documents that have all of the words, irrespective of how far apart each term occurs and their order within the document. For example, searching for breach AND contract returns any document that has both terms. This was temporarily changed in GX4 to an “&”. After receiving user feedback, you can once again use “AND”.
“OR” Searches: Worldox supports the logical OR operator. Joining terms with OR results in any documents that have any one or more of the words. Note the difference from AND, which requires that all the specified words appear in the document. This was temporarily changed in GX4 to a pipe symbol “|”. After receiving user feedback, you can once again use “or”.
Capitalization: Worldox searches are not case sensitive. For example, the following are equivalent: President, PRESIDENT and pReSidEnT. This has not changed from previous versions.
Punctuation: Punctuation is significant in searches. For example, searching for ASPCA will not find documents containing “A.S.P.C.A.” To find such a term, you must enter the periods between the letters (A.S.P.C.A.).
Automatic Exclusion of Common Words: Worldox ignores common words, such as “the” and “how,” as well as certain single digits and single letters. Such words tend to slow down searches, as they are found in most documents. Worldox indicates that a common word has been excluded by displaying the Edit Query dialog. This dialog, shown in the following screen shot, offers the option of including common words in the search.
“+” Searches: If a common word is essential to what you are searching for, you can force its inclusion by placing the “+” sign in front of it. In the search, his current position, Worldox ignores the common word “his”. This means you might get a document with “her position is current” or “the current position is untenable.” To include “his” in the search, and therefore exclude the extraneous hits, enter +his current position.
Word Variations (Stemming): Worldox text searching supports the use of the wildcard character “*” for word stemming. Use the asterisk when you want to search for variations of a term. For example, searching for pres* will find such words as pressure, president and press. You can place asterisks only at the end of a series of letters, not at the beginning of a word. Worldox also supports the use of word stemming within phrases.
Phrase Searches: Search for complete, literal phrases by enclosing the words in quotation marks. Words enclosed in quotation marks (“like this”) will appear together in all results, exactly as entered. Phrase searches are especially useful when looking for company names, direct quotes and proper names.
“W/x” Proximity Searches: Use the “W/x” operator, where x is the maximum number of words of separation allowed. For example, searching for microsoft w/5 lawsuit locates documents where the terms “microsoft” and “lawsuit” occur within five words of one another. Note that the order in which the words occur is not significant—only their relative position (proximity) to one another matters.
Space between Words: By default, a space between words acts a proximity search where X occurs within three words of Y.
Full Text Searching (Examples)
motion to compel finds documents where the word “motion” occurs within three words of “compel.” Since “to” is a common word, it is ignored. (This is equivalent to motion w/3 compel, w/3 being the Worldox default.)
order cease desist Finds documents where the word “order” occurs within three words of “cease,” and where the word “desist” also occurs within three words of “cease.” For example, this search would find documents with “order to cease and desist.” However, it would not find something like “I gave you an order, and if you don’t cease right now, I will desist from authorizing your dessert!” (You could find a document contain-ing this phrase by recasting your search as order w/5 cease w/5 desist.)
“order to cease and desist” Finds documents that include the exact phrase “order to cease and desist” only. To find an exact phrase, enclose it in quotation marks.
1992 AND gonzalez AND pleading Finds documents with the terms “1992,” “gonzalez” and “pleading.” All three terms must appear. This differs from searching for 1992 gonzalez pleading in that the terms do not have to occur within three words of one another when joined with AND.
wor* Finds documents beginning with the letters “wor.” This would find, for example, documents with such words as “Worldox,” “worldwide,” “workshop” and “worship.”
hospital w/10 jalapeno finds documents where the word “jalapeno” occurs within 10 words of “hospital.” For example, “She was taken to the hospital after eating a particularly hot jalapeno.
"truck OR lorry” finds documents with either the first word, the second word or both words. In this example, the term “lorry” is a synonym for “truck,” so including it in the search, joined with OR, ensures that you’ll find documents using either term.
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