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Advanced Search

Learn about advanced search techniques and operators.

Joel Bradley avatar
Written by Joel Bradley
Updated this week

Applies to: All Stack Overflow for Teams

Overview

Being able to effectively locate content in your knowledge base is an important skill. Sometimes, you need to go beyond basic searches to find what you need and filter out what you don't. Stack Overflow for Teams offers many advanced search capabilities to make your searches precise and efficient.

To learn more about basic search functions, read the Basic Search article. To learn how to search your knowledge base and the public Stack Overflow site at the same time, read the Unified Search article.

Advanced search tips

When you first place your cursor in the empty search box, you'll see helpful tips displayed under the search box.

The top of the search results page has an Advanced Search Tips link. Click it to see instructions for some of the most useful advanced search operators.

Click Advanced Search Tips again to hide the tips.

Advanced search operators

SOE offers a number of advanced search operators to help you refine and focus your searches. You can combine multiple operators as needed.

Range operators

Range operators allow you to search for questions that fall within a particular range for score, number of answers, or number of views. You can enter an upper or lower parameter, or a range.

Search Example

Results

score: or score:1..

Return posts with a score greater than or equal to 1.

views:500..1000

Return posts with 500 to 1,000 views.

answers:..3

Return questions with 3 or fewer answers.

Dates

You can use specific dates or date ranges to find posts created or active within a certain time period. You can use the following operators for date searches.

Search Example

Results

created:(date or range)

Specify when the post was created.

lastactive:(date or range)

Specify when the post last had activity.

Absolute dates and ranges

Stack Overflow for Teams search supports the following date formats.

Year only

Year and month

Full date

Date

2012

2012-04

2012-04-03

Date Range

2012..2013

2012-04..2012-05

2012-04-03..2012-04-04

The start of a date range is the first calendar day of the range, while the end is the last calendar day of the range. For example: if you specify a year, the search range will start on January 1 and end on December 31.

Relative dates and ranges

​Relative dates are calculated relative to the current day. You can use shorthand terms "1y", "1m", and "1d" for "last year", "last month", and "yesterday" respectively. Use a number larger than 1 to search X years, months, or days ago. Use ".." to specify a start and end for a range.

Here are some examples of relative date and date range searches.

Search Example

Results

created:1m

Posts created in the previous month

lastactive:7d

Posts last active seven days ago

created:3m…

Posts created in the last three months

lastactive:3m..2m

Posts last active between three and two months ago

NOTE: All times are in UTC (Coordinated Universal Time), so the results may not match your timezone.

User Operators

You can also limit searches to a specific user's content (your own or someone else's).

Search Example

Results

user:123

Returns posts created by the user with user ID 123.

inbookmarks:456

Returns only questions that are in user 456's bookmarks.

intags:mine

Returns posts that appear in your watched tags. If you don't have any watched tags, this operator returns all posts. Note that you can't use the intags operator with a user ID.

In advanced searches, "me" and "mine" are shorthand for your user ID. You can substitute these for the user ID in any user ID-based search.

Boolean Operators

Advanced search offers several boolean operators that generate identical results: 1/0, true/false, or yes/no. The following search operators use booleans.

Search Example

Results

isaccepted:1/0

Returns only accepted or unaccepted answers.

hascode:1/0

Returns only posts that do/don't contain code blocks in the body.

hasaccepted:1/0

Returns only questions that do/don't have accepted answers.

isanswered:1/0

Returns only questions that do/don't have at least one positively-scored answer.

closed:1/0

Returns only questions that are/aren't closed, including duplicates.

duplicate:1/0

Returns only questions that are/aren't marked as a duplicate of another question.

obsolete:1/0

Returns only posts that are/aren't marked as obsolete.

The following boolean search operators are available only on Stack Overflow for Teams Enterprise. Find your plan.

Search Example

Results

migrated:1/0

Returns only posts that have/haven't been migrated to a different site.

locked:1/0

Returns only locked/unlocked posts (answers, edits, votes, and comments disabled)

hasnotice:1/0

Returns only posts that do/don't have a notice appended.

wiki:1/0

Returns only posts that are/aren't community wiki posts.

OR operator

To combine results from multiple tags, separate the tag names (enclosed in square brackets) with the word "or". For example: the search "[apples] or [bananas]" returns questions tagged with either tag. Omitting "or" from the search implies the "and" operator, resulting in the search returning only those posts tagged with both tags.

Miscellaneous operators

Search Example

Results

url:somewhere.com

Returns posts with a rendered hyperlink that contains the specified URL.

is:question

Returns only questions.

is:answer

Returns only answers.

inquestion:1234

Returns only answers to the specified question.

inquestion:this

Returns only answers to the question you're currently viewing.

Advanced search with the API

You can use the Stack Overflow for Teams API /search endpoint with advanced search operators to search for content on your site. For more information on the API, check out our API v3 for Teams Basic and Business and API v3 for Teams Enterprise articles.


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