Guide to Searching in Nuix Products
This introduction covers:
Purpose of the guide
Search tips and tricks
Purpose of the guide
This guide details the various search techniques and syntax you can use for conducting effective searches to obtain accurate results when searching in Nuix products that use the engine to run queries, including Nuix Workstation, Nuix Automation, and Nuix Investigate.
Nuix search syntax enables you to define queries to extract relevant information from the data that exists in your system. The syntax is easy-to-use and is illustrated in this guide with examples.
Before learning about search syntax, familiarize yourself with the search interface of the Nuix application.
Search tips and tricks
Before exploring the queries and operators, the following are some search tips and tricks to help you formulate accurate queries:
Sample your search results to ensure that your syntax is correct for the results you expect to return.
Some Nuix products have global settings that restrict searches from retrieving certain property fields, such as path. If you share your Nuix installation with other users, check these settings prior to starting a Nuix search.
Nuix does not support the use of the reserved SQL word 'null'. Instead, use a reverse wildcard query to find all null values in a particular field. To find all items without a name use –name:*
Searches execute on the current results set shown and thus can produce different results when you run the same query again. For example, if you search for name:* and then the reverse -name:*, the second search produces no results. Using the Clear button before running a search on -name:* results in a list of items with no names.
Always enter a search term in lowercase because words from the content are stored in lowercase, except in Exact queries. Searches ignore punctuation marks - except in Exact queries.
If your search contains a distance parameter, ensure that it is in the format “nn”. If you omit the 0, the search treats “.” as punctuation and ignores it.
Use a hyphen to reverse a search query. For example:
To match all system files, use kind:system.
To exclude all system files, use –kind:system.
Recommended: Explicitly use operators and parentheses for precedence ordering when constructing complex queries. This assists in reading and understanding how the search executes and ensures that there are no unintended or unexpected results.
Some paths contain virtual names for folders without names in the physical container items such as PSTs and Top of Personal Folders. Recommended: Double-check any searches using paths with a 0 result set, by breaking the path query into two sections, path:[path up to the container] * AND path:*[Final folder name that you wish to search]