# Search and Retrieval

IDOL Server offers a range of retrieval methods, from simple legacy keyword search to sophisticated conceptual querying.

## Conceptual Matches

IDOL Server accepts a piece of content (a sentence, paragraph, or page of text, the body of an email, a record containing human-readable information, or the derived contextual information of an audio or speech snippet) or reference (identifier) as input and returns references to conceptually related documents ranked by relevance, or contextual distance. IDOL Server uses this process to generate automatic hyperlinks between pieces of content.

## Advanced Keyword Search

IDOL Server matches any term or phrase that appears in quotation marks in its exact form before stemming.

## Boolean and Bracketed Boolean Search

IDOL Server accepts simple or complex Boolean and bracketed Boolean expressions and returns a list of matching documents. You can form Boolean expressions using a set of Boolean and proximity operators.

`AND` | `XOR`/`EOR` | `WNEAR`
`NOT` | `NEAR` | `BEFORE`
`OR` | `DNEAR` | `AFTER`

## Exact Phrase Search

IDOL Server provides the ability to search for exact phrases by putting quotation marks around a string of words. For example: “world market”.

## Field Restrictions

Simple field restrictions in query text allow you to restrict results to documents that contain specific values in specific fields.

## FieldText Search

FieldText searches provide a wide range of field specifiers that you can use to query fields, restrict query results, or bias query result scores.

## Fuzzy Search

If a search string is not quite accurate (for example, if it contains spelling mistakes), a fuzzy query returns results that contain words that are similar to the entered string.

## Parametric Search

IDOL Server supports real-time navigation across multiple taxonomies with no additional manual configuration necessary, including full access to intersections of diverse taxonomy definitions.

From among the complete set of field names in the corpus, you can define a subset of fields in the server configuration as parametric fields.

After indexing, IDOL Server creates and stores a structure that contains information about all tag/value pairs that occur in defined parametric fields. A tag/value pair is a particular textual or numerical value paired with a specific field name.

You can then query IDOL Server with the name of a parametric field or fields. IDOL Server returns a list of all textual values that appear in the specified field or fields in all the documents stored in the server. This underlying operation can power a user interface that enables users to refine the scope of a query from the complete corpus to a subset of highly relevant documents.

Advanced Parametric Refinement provides an improved user experience coupled with increased productivity using an advanced real-time information discovery process.

## Proper Names Search

IDOL Server recognizes names and treats them as a unit.

## Proximity Search

IDOL Server returns documents in which specific terms occur within a specified proximity with a higher weighting.

## Soundex Keyword Search

If the spelling of a keyword is not quite accurate but is phonetically correct, a Soundex keyword search returns results that contain the keyword and phonetically similar keywords. This process uses a configurable Soundex algorithm.

## Synonym Search

A synonym query returns results that are conceptually similar to the query terms or conceptually similar to the synonyms that are available for the query terms.

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