Searching for a phrase

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Developer System Administrator

You probably encounter cases where you want to find index items containing a specific phrase, sentence, or sequence of terms, rather than sparse occurrences of the keywords throughout the index items. You can use a phrase match query syntax to find such index items. Phrase search isn’t case-sensitive.

In the search box, type the phrase, sentence, or term sequence that you want to find, surrounded by double quote marks, and then click Search.

For example, "financial statements of the United Oil company" only returns index items containing the exact phrase or sentence. Items containing sparse or shuffled occurrences of the keywords aren’t returned.

Tip

  • Don’t use double quotation marks for a single term. Rather use the + prefix to search for an exact term.

  • You can use straight (" ") or alternate pairs of left and right quote marks (such as “ ” or « ») to enclose phrases.

Alternatively, you can use any one of the contiguity operators (. : / \ _ - ') between keywords for which you want to only find contiguous occurrences. All these characters have the same effect, so you can use any of them.

For example, financial.statements-of\the_United:Oil/company is equivalent to "financial statements of the United Oil company".

Similarly, financial_statements United_Oil yields the same results as "financial statements" "United Oil". Only index items containing contiguous occurrences of the exact words financial and statements as well as contiguous occurrences of the exact words united and oil are returned.

Note

Since the January 2016 version of the Coveo Search API, exact phrase search is always available, even when the Coveo query syntax (enableQuerySyntax option) is disabled by the search page developer.

If you have querying issues, see Troubleshoot querying issues.