Google Search Appliance Protocol Reference - Manual (Page 30)

Google Search Appliance: Search Protocol Reference Request Format 30
Wildcard Search
If you precede a query with wildcard:, you can search by entering a wildcard pattern instead of the
exact spelling of a term. By default, wildcard search is enabled for each front end of the search
appliance. However, to use wildcard search, you must ensure that wildcard indexing is also enabled for
your search appliance by using the Index > Index Settings page in the Admin Console.
Note: If wildcard indexing is disabled, users will experience search issues in which case the search
appliance administrator can disable implicit wildcard search on each front-end.
The search appliance supports two wildcard: operators:
• *--Matches zero or more characters
• ?--Matches exactly 1 character
The search appliance is able to consider all words with * as wildcard terms, so users don't need to
prepend the wildcard: special operator to a pattern that contains this operator. To enable the search
appliance to do this, click the Consider words with * as wildcards by default checkbox on the Search
> Search Features > Front Ends > Filters page.
Take note that words that have special characters, such as apostrophes, in them are not matched by
wildcard search.
Using wildcards can simplify queries for long names, technical data, pharmaceutical information, or
strings where the exact spelling varies or is unknown. A user can search for all words starting with a
particular pattern, ending with a particular pattern, or having a particular substring pattern. A wildcard
query term must satisfy at least one of the following conditions:
• A sequence to at least 2 characters at the start of a word, for example: go*
• A sequence to at least 2 characters at the end of a word, for example: *le
• A sequence of at least 3 characters anywhere in the word, for example: *ear*
Sample usage:
wildcard:test*
wildcard:?nter
Wildcard search is also supported for metadata queries, but the wildcard: special operator is omitted.
For example: inmeta:name*. Also, metadata queries are %-encoded, which affects the form of an
inmeta: wildcard query.
Wildcard search is not supported for other common queries, including filetype, inurl, intext, and
so on. Also, wildcard search is not supported with Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or Thai.
Filtering
Google search provides many ways for you to filter the results that are returned from your search query.
In addition to the automatic filtering and language filtering described in this section, the search
appliance provides filtering by query parameters (see “Search Parameters” on page 10), query terms
(see “Query Terms” on page 22) and meta tags (see “Meta Tags” on page 41), which are documented in
their respective sections.