AND/OR Connectors

Connectors are used to join search clauses together. You can search for ANY of the separate clauses using the OR connector or ALL of them with the AND connector. Using the same syntax: field—operator—value, place the connector between the clauses.

Finding either value:

Author: smith OR Author: jones

If all the values must be found, use the AND connector:

Author: jones AND Doctype: memo

Be sure to include the fields appropriately when you search with AND and OR connectors. This search is not looking in the Author field for either bob or rob.

Author: "bob" or "rob"

The above search translates to Author: "bob" OR Anytext: "rob" rather than searching for either value in just the Author field. The below search is confined to the Author field.

Author: "bob" or Author: "rob"

Note: Do not mix case. When entering connectors into the Search box, When entering connectors into the Search box, you must use either AND (all upper case) or and (all lower case), but never use And or aNd. This is the same for the OR connector; use OR or or.

Understanding Search Strings Using AND and OR Connectors

When constructing multi-term clauses using AND and OR, please note that AND has higher precedence; therefore, it is important to use parentheses to tell the search engine how to separate your search clauses. To run a search to return records that are PDFs and the Author field contains either joe or john, make sure you set off the OR terms parenthetically. For example:

(Author:joe OR Author:john) AND Doctype:PDF

If you do not place parentheses based upon the desired outcome, you may get unexpected results. For example, without the parentheses, the above search will be parsed like this:

Author:joe OR (Author:john AND Doctype:PDF)