Special symbols

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Special symbols

Certain symbols can be used in place of letters or characters in query words, to help refine or expand a query. Perceptive Search will replace the symbols with letters according to its built-in logic, and run the query on any resultant words. Using these symbols can save you having to think up and type all the permutations of a word that you need to include in a query.

Note that using these word expansion systems can still only retrieve words that are listed in your index.

*	This is a wildcard symbol, and can be used to search for any number of significant characters. End of word Will find all words that start with the letters appearing before the symbol. For example 'manage' will find 'management', 'manages', 'managed', 'manager', etc. Middle of word* Will find all words that begin and end with the specified letters. e.g. 'ding' will find 'dying', 'divorcing', 'dividing', 'droning', etc. Beginning of word* Will find all words that end with the specified letters. Note that this option may significantly increase the search time required. Alone This will select the first word in all documents; a way of providing a list of all the documents in the index.
?	This is a single-character wildcard symbol, and can be used to search for any single character. For example, searching for "h?t" would match "hat" or "hit", but not "heat". Both forms of wildcard may be used together in any combination desired, e.g."un*gra?ing".
~	Tense conflation (tense expansion). Asks Perceptive Search to find all tense forms of the word specified. Trailing conflation Expands the tenses at the end of a word. For example, 'posting~' will find 'posted', 'posts', 'post' and 'poster', but not 'posture', 'postpone', etc. Leading conflation Expands the tenses at the beginning of a word. For example, '~post' would also find 'outpost', 'prepost' and 'repost'. By default, Perceptive Search automatically applies limited tense conflation to search terms. You can control tense expansion settings for all your queries using the Query Options. If automatic tense conflation is on, using this character turns it off; if automatic conflation is off, this character turns it on.
+	Toggle synonym expansion and thesaurus on or off. When appended to a word, this symbol reverses the automatic synonym expansion setting in the Query Options. By default, synonym expansion is set to on. Using this symbol in a query will turn it off for the word to which it is applied. For more information about Synonyms, see Synonym Rings. If neither synonym expansion or the thesaurus are turned on, the trailing + symbol will turn them both on for a given search term. If both are turned on, the + symbol will turn them both off. If only one option is active, the + symbol will switch it off (and leave the other option as it is) for a given search term.