SharePoint 2010 : Use the Advanced Search (in SharePoint Server)

To get to the advanced search page, navigate to the Search Center and click on the Advanced link (see Figure 1). Depending on the configuration of the site, you may also have other links to the advanced search page.

Figure 1. The Advanced link in the Search Center.

The advanced search page allows you to search more specifically and in a more exact manner on parts of the document or list item (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. The advanced search page.

In this page, you can specify to look for words, exactly as you do with the simple search option. When you type words in the Any of These Words box, the search results contain only documents or list items that have all the words you type, but not necessarily in the same order. You can use the other options to refine your search. For example, if you select The Exact Phase, you can type a few words, and items will be returned in the results only if they contain the exact phrase. And you can specify words that you don’t want in the documents and select the None of These Words box.

Another way to narrow a search is to specify a language. This option is usually used for web pages and not for documents, unless the documents have a property called Language.

You can specify the result type to search; for example, for Microsoft Word documents, Microsoft Excel documents, or Microsoft PowerPoint documents. Or you can just select Documents to make sure your search returns only documents—and not list items (see Figure 3). The site administrator can customize this box to include more types.

Figure 3. Selecting the result type.

Finally, you can specify a search on specific properties that the site administrator configured for you to search on. You can add up to five conditions, such as Property X Equals/Does Not Equal Y, as shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4. Searching on properties.

As shown in Figure 4, you can chain a few conditions together and choose whether they should be chained by using an Or operator or an And operator. For example, if you specify Author Equals John and Title Equals Example, the only results will be the ones whose author is John and whose title is exactly Example. But if you search for Author Equals John or Title Equals Example, the results will include documents that have been authored by John and documents whose title is Example—not just the documents where both conditions are true.