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🔎 Search with Operators to Find Exactly What You Need

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Written by Maxime Renault
Updated over a week ago

🎯 Goal

Enable users to write more powerful, precise, and targeted queries using search operators (booleans, quotes, wildcards).

This is especially useful in professional environments where keywords are:

  • Technical,

  • Ambiguous,

  • Or must appear in a very specific form.

🧠 Why Use Search Operators?

Because sometimes you need to:

  • Require multiple terms to appear

  • Exclude certain terms (noise or irrelevant content)

  • Search word variations (plural, conjugations, suffixes
)

  • Target exact expressions (project names, locations, procedures
)

That’s where operators make the difference.

✅ Benefits

  • More accuracy → find what you're actually looking for, with less noise

  • Time savings → no need to open 20 documents to check

  • Combinatorial power → target specific projects, contexts, or technical constraints

  • Ideal for technical, legal, project, or RFP-related documents

📌 Key Takeaway

Search operators turn Outmind into a high-performance enterprise search engine.


They help you retrieve very specific information, even buried deep in dense documentation.

⚙ Operators Available in Outmind

1. 🔗 Boolean Operators: AND, OR, NOT (or +, |, -)

Purpose

Syntax

Example

All terms must appear

+term1 +term2 or AND

+gaine +désenfumage +plan +détail

At least one must appear

term1 OR term2 or `

`

Exclude a term

term1 -term2 or NOT

ephe -ephemeres

🔍 Note: +term is equivalent to "term" → it must be exactly that word.

2. âœłïž Wildcards: * (prefix or suffix only)

Purpose

Syntax

Example

Match word beginning

term*

indus* → industrie, industriel

Match word ending

*suffix

*ment → rùglement, confinement

⚠ Limitations:

  • Wildcards do not work in the middle of a word: a*magne ❌

  • In boolean queries, place wildcards at the end:

    • ✅ +CCTP +PN1543 +portes +manuel*

    • ❌ +CCTP +PN1543 +manuel* +portes

3. đŸ§Ÿ Quotation Marks: "..." to search exact phrases

Purpose

Syntax

Example

Exact phrase search

"word1 word2"

"Ă©tude de marchĂ©" → avoids variations like â€œĂ©tude sur le marchĂ©â€

This helps avoid false positives where words appear separately or out of context.

🔍 Real-World Search Examples

Query

What it retrieves

"coeur défense" AND traverse

Docs with the exact phrase “coeur dĂ©fense” and the word “traverse”

ephe -ephemeres

Docs containing “ephe” but excluding “ephemeres”

"ethylene" AND price

Mentions of ethylene pricing

"gaine désenfumage" +plan +détail

Precise results about detailed smoke vent duct plans

"interrupteur différentiel" AND schneider

Discussions about Schneider-brand differential switches

geostaff AND béton AND poutre

Documents combining all three technical concepts

"grand stade" AND "saint-denis"

Targeting a specific site/project (double exact phrase)

CCTP +PN1543 +portes +l’industrie +manuel*

A CCTP referring to project PN1543, doors, industry, and manuals

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