Searching for an Exact Term

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You have probably encountered cases where you only want to find items containing an exact term, and aren’t interested in items containing variants of this term. In such cases, you need to use an exact term query syntax. This syntax disables the otherwise useful stemming feature that expands the search to words with the same root (see About Stemming).

In the search box, type the exact desired term preceded by the plus sign (+, the exact match prefix), and then click Search. Only items containing the desired term will be returned, and terms of the same family that are normally searched as well will be ignored.

+performance

Only items containing the exact word performance are returned. Items containing same root words such as performed or performing aren’t returned, as opposed to when stemming is enabled.

+speciel

Imagine speciel is a product name or a word in another language. Only items containing speciel are returned. Spell corrections or automatic replacement of speciel with the English word special aren’t suggested (see Query Correction feature).

You can combine exact match terms with normal term search in the same query.

employee +performance engineering

Only items containing the exact word performance as well as the words employee and engineering and their variant forms are returned. Items containing same root words such as performed or performing aren’t returned.

The + prefix also forces the exact match for terms containing accented characters. This feature is useful with languages using accents such as French, Spanish, or Swedish.

+déjà

Only items containing déjà are returned. Items containing accented character variants such as déja or no accented characters such as deja aren’t returned.

  • The match isn’t case-sensitive.

  • The pound sign (#), which is an old but still supported prefix, has the same effect as the plus sign (+).

  • You can’t use wildcard characters in combination with an exact match prefix (see Using Wildcards in Queries).

If you have querying issues, see Troubleshoot Querying Issues for troubleshooting guidelines.