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Overview of the Windows SharePoint Services Search Query

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A Search in Windows SharePoint Services query is similar to a standard SQL query, as shown in the syntax.

SELECT <columns>
FROM <content source>
WHERE <conditions> 
RANK BY <conditions>
ORDER BY <columns>

Remarks

The Search query syntax supports many options, enabling more complicated queries.

The following table describes each clause in the SELECT statement, and the features it supports.

Clause

Description

SELECT

Specifies the columns returned by the query.

FROM

Specifies the location to search.

WHERE

Specifies what constitutes a matching document. This clause has many options, enabling rich control over the search conditions. For example, you can match against words, phrases, inflectional word forms, strings, numeric and bitwise values, and multivalued arrays. You can also combine matching conditions with Boolean operators.

ORDER BY

Specifies the sort order for the results returned by the query. You can specify more than one field on which the results are sorted, and you can use ascending or descending ordering.

Query Example

The following example searches for documents where the title contains "SharePoint".

SELECT rank, title, path, author from Scope() WHERE CONTAINS(title,'SharePoint') 

See Also

Reference

SELECT Statement in Windows SharePoint Services Search SQL Syntax

FROM Clause in Windows SharePoint Services Search SQL Syntax

WHERE Clause in Windows SharePoint Services Search SQL Syntax

Concepts

Windows SharePoint Services Search Query Object Model

Windows SharePoint Services Query Web Service