Evidence operators

Evidence operators expand a search word into a list of related words that are then searched for as well. When you perform a search using an evidence operator, documents containing one or more occurrences of the words in the expanded word list are documents containing the word specified, as well as its synonyms. Documents retrieved using evidence operators are not relevance-ranked unless you use the MANY modifier. See “MANY modifier”. Table 8-1 describes each evidence operator.

**Table 8-1: Evidence operators**
Operator name	Description
WORD	Selects documents that include one or more instances of a word you specify.
STEM	Selects documents that include one or more variations of the search word you specify.
THESAURUS	Selects documents that contain one or more synonyms of the word you specify.
WILDCARD	Selects documents that contain matches to a character string containing variables.
SOUNDEX	Selects documents that include one or more words that “sound like,” or whose letter pattern is similar to, the word specified.
NEAR/N	Expands the search to include the word you enter plus words that are similar to the query term. This operator performs “approximate pattern matching” to identify similar words.