The Contact Search feature allows you to increase the accuracy of your search for contact information. The results of the search will be based on the nearest match or closest match for the word or group of words you have entered as your search criteria. You do not have to enter the exact word or phrase in order to find results with the Contact Search feature; just one of the words you are looking for or even its approximate spelling will do.
While searching for contacts, the program considers the following fields:
Table |
Field |
Contact |
Name Search Name Name 2 Address Address 2 City Phone No. Telex No. Fax No. Telex Answer Back VAT Registration No. Post Code Country Home Page Company Name Mobile Phone No. Pager |
Rlshp. Mgt. Comment Line |
Comment |
Interaction Log Entry |
Description Subject |
To-do |
Description |
Opportunity |
Description |
To split the textual information into smaller parts which will be used while performing the search, the program uses a set of characters which are called delimiters.
The following characters are used by the system as default delimiters:
! "#$%&'()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\]^_`{|}~
Using delimiters by the program allows increasing the search hit rate.
For example, in the Rlshp. Mgt. Comment Line window, you entered the comment:
Call the manager,important!
You were in a hurry and did not read this sentence again. You therefore forgot to put a space between the two words: "manager" and "important".
Later you are looking for the contact with this comment. Unless you have put a comma "," into the delimiters set, you will not be able to find this entry. If a comma is not considered by the program as a separator between words, you will never find this comment line entering either "manager" or "important" in the Find What field. The system will look for the "manager,important" entry only.
The four characters: space ( ), asterisk (*), "at" (@) and question mark (?) are used by the program as delimiters regardless of whether or not they are included into the current delimiters list.
You need to index the information that will be used for future searches, especially if you have modified or added any information.
You may choose to have Contact Search Index generated automatically or do it manually:
If you select Auto in the Search Index Mode field in the Relationship Management Setup window, each time you add or modify any information, for example, if you change the description of an interaction or a contact address, the program will automatically update the data in the fields processed by the contact search feature as well as the blurry keys for the words they contain for future search operations.
If you select Manual, you will need to run the Generate Search Index batch job for the program to process the new or changed information for future search operations.
For all words the program has found in the fields listed above, it creates one or two blurry keys following a certain fuzzy logic algorithm, for example, JN and AN for Jean or KRX and KRK for Karch. After the program has completed the search for exact match, it performs the search on the base of the blurry keys which allows finding words with close spelling and/or pronunciation in the languages of Romano-Germanic group and therefore increases the search hit rate.
The program does not use the blurry keys while searching for contacts if you have selected the check box in the Exact Match field in the Contact Search window or if you use the wildcards in your search query.
Generating Contact Search Index