The search function performs a free text search of the Knowledgebase. It searches the current displayed category and all its subcategories.

The default search algorithm regards any sequence of true word characters (letters, digits, and underscores) as a word. That sequence may also contain apostrophes ('), but not more than one in a row. This means that aaa'bbb is regarded as one word, but aaa''bbb is regarded as two words. Apostrophes at the beginning or the end of a word are stripped by the FULLTEXT parser; 'aaa'bbb' would be parsed as aaa'bbb.

The parser determines where words start and end by looking for certain delimiter characters; for example, " " (space), "," (comma), and "." (period).

Some words are ignored in full-text searches:

Every correct word in the collection and in the query is weighted according to its significance in the collection or query. Consequently, a word that is present in many documents has a lower weight (and may even have a zero weight), because it has lower semantic value in this particular collection. Conversely, if the word is rare, it receives a higher weight. The weights of the words are combined to compute the relevance of the row.

Words that are present in at least 50% of the rows are effectively treated as stopwords. This is because a word that matches half of the rows in a table is less likely to locate relevant documents. In fact, it most likely finds plenty of irrelevant documents.