Search the Content of Documents with the Contents Term

Content searches are among the most common searches used to find documents. This article shows you how to make the most out of content searches.

Table of Contents

• Introduction to content searches
• Single word searches
• Link words or phrases with the OR operator
• Link words or phrases with the AND operator
• Grouping
• Other operators
• Has any text
• Special characters

Introduction to content searches

Here are some basics about using content searches:

• You can build content searches out of a single term or multi-word phrases
• You can link terms and phrases together with “AND” and “OR” logical operators
• Content searches are not case-sensitive
• There are no stop or noise words; Everlaw indexes all words for content searches

Single word searches

To create a single term search, type the desired term into the content search term. The search below will return the documents that contain the word "energy".

Phrase searches

To search for a multi-word phrase, surround the phrase with quotation marks. The search below will return documents that contain the phrase “california summer”.

Link words or phrases with the OR operator

There are three ways to OR terms or phrases together within a contents search. Each of the following three examples returns the same results: documents that contain at least one of the three words/phrases "energy", "california summer, or "enron audit":

• Separate terms or phrases by a comma or space. This automatically defaults to an “OR” search.
• Type “OR” (in all caps) between words or phrases
• Use the “||” symbol  between words or phrases       

Link words or phrases with the AND operator

There are two ways to AND terms or phrases together. The following two example both return results that contain both the word "blackout" and the phrase "california summer':

• Use “AND” (in all caps) to separate the words/phrases
• Use “&&”

Grouping

You can use parentheses to form subqueries within searches. This is useful if you want to control which terms or phrases a logical operator applies to. For example,  to search for documents that contain either the word “juice” or “orange” and the word “organic”, build the following search (juice oranges) && organic:          

Other operators

Aside from “AND” and “OR” operators, Everlaw also supports “NOT”, “+”,  and “-”.

• The “NOT” operator allows you to exclude documents that contain the word or phrase that follows the operator. For example, to find all documents that contain the phrase “cumulative risk” but not the word “regulation”, build the following search ""cumulative risk" NOT regulation":                          
• The “+” operator allows you to designate terms that must appear in the documents that are retrieved via a search. For example, if you want to look for documents that must contain “cumulative” and, optionally, might contain “risk”, you would build the following search:                          
• The “-” operator allows you to designate terms that cannot appear in the documents that are retrieved via a search. For example, if you want to look for documents that contain the phrase “cumulative risk” but not the word “government”, you would build the following search:

Has any text

To search for all documents that have any searchable text select the Has any text box. For example, a document with an empty text file would not be returned here.

Special characters

 You can also create a content search for the following special characters:

• "#", "@", "&", "%," as well as many currency symbols ("$," "€," "£," etc.).
• Other special characters, like "(" or "/", are treated as spaces. For example, to search for the phrase "if/when," enter the string "if when" (quotes included) into the content search term.
• Everlaw can also index diacritics (for example, é or ñ). Searching for "fiancée" will yield different results than searching for "fiancee."
• Emojis can also be searched for in content searches by typing the emoji you are searching for into the contents search box. An example search for the emoji "💎" is shown below.
• If you are using keyboard shortcuts to construct your searches, you can create content searches by typing your desired search directly into a blank term and selecting "Did you mean to run a Contents search for [...]?"