Search query logic

Stemming

Search determines appropriate variations of a word in the search query.

For example, the word cats is stemmed as cat, and will return results containing cat, cats, and catamaran. Stemming would not return results for the word scattering because the stem is compared against the beginning of a word.

Language

Words are stemmed based on your site's language, and search accounts for special characters in languages like German, Russian, or Spanish.

Stop words

Search does not index commonly used words and prepositions, such as a, an, to, from, or the. This would clutter search results.

Double quotes

Put double quotes around phrases if you want to search for the whole phrase instead of individual words.

When you search a query with multiple words without double quotes, each word is searched individually. Because of this, some results may rank highly despite not including all of the words in your query.

For example, if you search for "API token" you will receive results that include the phrase API token. But if you search for API token, you will get results for API and results for token.

Underscores

If your search query contains words separated by underscores, search will find files that match any word in the query, but only pages that contain exact matches to the query.