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You can search pages, page titles, tags, or the text of attachments using Socialtext. Type the words you are looking for in the Search box in the top of the sidebar. A list of matching pages that contain ALL of the terms will be returned.

Searches are case insensitive and use Stemming. Matches are made on content containing the search term. That means that a search for Magic Elixir will match any search target containing Magic Elixir, such as Magic Elixir of Love and also Magic Elixir of Life.

Advanced searching

Search by phrase.

You search for a phrase by enclosing the phrase in double-quotes. For example, "end of quarter" will find all pages containing the exact phrase end of quarter.

Search by title.

To find a page with a particular title, start the search with title: For example, use title:help to find pages with "help" in the title. An equal sign is shorthand for title:. For example, =help to find pages with help in the title.

Search by category.

You can search for pages in categories with tag: or with category:. For example, category:expense will return all pages whose tags contain the word expense. tag:"Ken's Blog" will return all pages with tags containing the phrase "Ken's Blog".

Search with wildcards.

When searching for terms with plurals, suffixes, or irregular endings, you can use the wildcard * to match any variation of the end of the term. For example, child* will match "child", "childhood", '"childlike", and "children". Wildcards only work on the ends of search terms: foo*bar is not a wildcard search.

Exclude a term.

You can search for all pages except those containing a term by prefixing the excluded term with a minus sign. For example, meeting -agenda will find all pages that contain the word "meeting" without the word "agenda". History -tag:American will find pages containing the word history unless they have a tag containing the word American.

Combining search terms

Any of the three search types (keyword, title, tag) may be combined using the combining words AND, OR, and NOT. AND is the default for joining search terms. Note all caps. For example:

Grouping search terms

Parenthesis may be used to group search terms into larger search terms. For example, (tag:Ken OR tag:Barbie) AND (tag:Tom OR tag:Jerry) will find pages whose tags contain Ken and Tom, Ken and Jerry, Barbie and Tom, or Barbie and Jerry.
Search for (Shakespeare OR Milton) AND NOT Balzac will find pages with English poets but not French.

Stemming

All search indexes are built and searches performed using stemming. Stemming indexes and searches on the roots of words. For example, if you search for the word "walk", the search engine will also find "walked" and "walking". Stemming may not always work the way you anticipate - there are many different stemming schemes, some linguistic, some syntactic. For example, "walker" does not stem to "walk" because walker is a noun and walk is a verb.

The stemming feature is currently configured for English only.

RSS feed for search

The search results are available as an rss feed. You can do a search, and then if you would like to subscribe to it in your rss reader, click on the orange button next to the search results.

Advanced formatting: Including a search inside a page

You can quickly and easily build dashboards monitoring activity throughout your workspace by including dynamic searches inside your pages. From Advanced mode, use any of the following elements, or use the Insert... menu in Simple mode to insert a search element and fill in its content. Any of the search types and formats noted above may be included in a search embedded in a page.

Note: all searches ignore case. The searches are recalculated whenever a page is opened or saved.

Keyword search

Keyword search, full - include page contents

Title search

Title search, full - include page contents

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