The help search is a full-text search that supports exact
phrases, word stems (in English and German), wildcard characters,
and Boolean operators. You can control whether search results are
highlighted and how they are displayed in the Search Results list.
About this task
Note: Search strings are not case-sensitive.
The search results will be the same for open, Open, OPEN,
and "OpEn".
Procedure
- Enter terms in the Search field,
and click GO. The Search Results
view displays the top results, which are sorted by relevance.
- Select a search result to read the corresponding topic. The page automatically scrolls to the first occurrence
of the search term.
- You can change how search results are displayed:
- To turn term highlighting on and off, click Highlight
Search Terms

- To hide or show the result descriptions (the first several
words in the topic), click Show Result Descriptions

- To sort the results by criteria other than search relevance,
click Show Result Categories
. Sorting options available
vary from product to product.
- To toggle between the Contents view and the Search Results
view, click the Contents tab (
) or the Search Results tab
(
). The Search Results view displays
the topics that meet the search query.
- If your initial search produces too many or too few hits
to find what you are looking for, refine your search using these techniques:
- If you are confident that the information for which
you are searching is in a particular branch of the navigation tree,
select the topic at the top of the branch, click Search
Topics
and select Search this
topic and all subtopics.
- Use a longer, more specific phrase to bring more relevant
topics to the top of the results list.
- Enclose a phrase in quotation marks (" ") to find only
those topics that contain that exact phrase. The case is still ignored.
- (English and German only): Enclose a term in
quotation marks to eliminate word-stem results. For
example, without quotation marks, the search term challenge produces
hits for challenging and challenged. Change
the search term to "challenge" to eliminate
hits to the other words based on the same stem.
- Use a wildcard character:
- Asterisk (*): For multiple unknown or variable characters
in the term. For example, the search term par* returns partly, participate, partial,
and other words that begin with par.
- Question mark (?): For a single unknown or variable character
or zero character in the term. For example, the search term par? returns part and park but
not partial or partly.
- Use Boolean operators:
- AND: Narrows the search to include topics that contain
both terms. For example, if you enterdatabase AND "log file",
the search results include topics that contain both the term database and
the phrase log file.
- OR: Widens the search to include topics that contain either
one term or another. For example, if you enter database OR
"log file" , the search results include topics that contain
either database or log file.
- NOT: Searches for topics that do not contain a term or
phrase. For example, if you enter database NOT "log file",
the search results include topics that contain database but
do not contain log file.
- OR...NOT: Searches for topics that contain either of two
terms but do not contain another term. For example, if you enter database
OR "data base" NOT "log file", the search results include
topics that contain either database or data base but
that do not contain log file.
What to do next
If the search still returns too many results, consider narrowing
the search to a subset of topics.