Zones and Fields

Zone and field searching is useful when you believe that limiting your search to a particular zone or field will produce more accurate search results.

The Verity search engine can extract regions of text, zones and fields in documents, so that they can be searched. The zones and fields that are extracted must be specifically defined for the product. Depending on how the collection has been defined, a region of text can be only a zone, or it can be both a field and a zone. Not all products will have zone and fields defined.

What Is a Zone?

Zones are specific regions of a document to which searches can be limited, for example the title of a document.

The Verity search engine builds zone information into the collection’s full-word index, which allows quick and efficient searches over zones. You can search over zones for two specific types of documents:

Markup Language documents. This includes both SGML and HTML.

Internet Message Format documents. This includes standard e-mail and Usenet news messages.

What Is a Field?

Fields are extracted from the document and stored in the collection for retrieval and searching, for example a date field.

A region of text must first be defined as a zone in order to be a field.

Note

Field searches require an exact match of the query term to appear in the results list. In contrast, zone searches can find documents containing stemmed variations of the search term if it is not enclosed in double quotation marks.