Home Health Interactive supports “any words” searching, also known as “natural language” searching. An “any words” search is any sequence of text, like a sentence or a question.  After an “any words” search Home Health Interactive sorts retrieved documents by their relevance to your search request. Weighting of retrieved documents takes into account: the number of documents each word in your search request appears in (the more documents a word appears in, the less useful it is in distinguishing relevant from irrelevant documents); the number of times each word in the request appears in the documents; and the density of hits in each document.

Noise words, such as if and the, are ignored in searches.

Use quotation marks to indicate a phrase. You can use a phrase anywhere in a search request. Example:

• apple "fruit salad"

If a phrase contains a noise word, Home Health Interactive will skip over the noise word when searching for it. For example, a search for statue of liberty would retrieve any document containing the word statue, any intervening word, and the word liberty.
Punctuation inside of a search word is treated as a space. Thus, can't would be treated as a phrase consisting of two words: can and t.

Put + in front of any word or phrase that is required, and - in front of a word or phrase to exclude it. Example:

• "apple pie" -salad +"ice cream"

A search word can contain the wildcard characters * and ?. A ? in a word matches any single character, and a * matches any number of characters. The wildcard characters can be in any position in a word. For example:

• appl* would match apple, application, etc.
• *cipl* would match principle, participle, etc.
• appl? would match apply and apple but not apples.
• ap*ed would match applied, approved, etc.

Use of the * wildcard character near the beginning of a word will slow searches somewhat.

Phonic searching looks for a word that sounds like the word you are searching for and begins with the same letter. For example, a phonic search for Smith will also find Smithe and Smythe.
To ask Home Health Interactive to search for a word phonically, put a # in front of the word in your search request. Examples: #smith, #johnson
Phonic searching is somewhat slower than other types of searching.

When Home Health Interactive sorts search results after a search, by default all words in a request count equally in counting hits. However, you can change this by specifying the relative weights for each term in your search request, like this:

• apple:5 pear:1

This request would retrieve the same documents as apple and pear but, Home Health Interactive would weight apple five times as heavily as pear when sorting the results.
By default, Home Health Interactive automatically weights terms based on an analysis of their distribution in your documents. If you provide specific term weights in a search, these weights will override the weights Home Health Interactive would otherwise assign.

A numeric range search is a search for any numbers that fall within a range. To add a numeric range component to a search request, enter the upper and lower bounds of the search separated by ~~ like this:

• 12~~17

This request would find any document containing a number between 12 and 17.
Numeric range searches only work with positive integers. A numeric range search includes the upper and lower bounds (so 12 and 17 would be retrieved in the above example).
For purposes of numeric range searching, decimal points and commas are treated as spaces and minus signs are ignored. For example, -123,456.78 would be interpreted as: 123 456 78 (three numbers).