Overview
You can search multiple documents in your collection for words, and optionally filter results to documents with specific labels or entities. Multi-document search is a "smart" search, similar to Google search, that can match similar words and concepts, even in other languages.
You can also filter your documents by entity -- person, place, or organization -- before or after search, to limit your results to documents that show the selected entities, or to explore the entities found within the document.
Search a collection
To search all documents in a collection:
- Enter your search terms in the search bar at the top of the Documents view.
- To explore results in a given document, click the document in the results page.
- To return to the Documents view, click the X next to your search terms in the search bar. If you are filtering by label or entity, you will also have to remove the labels and entities to see your full search list.
- To save a Pinpoint search,bookmark the URL of the search results page in your browser.
Search behavior:
- By default, all terms listed must appear in a document in order to match your search. If you want to search for any matching terms, see the advanced search techniques below.
- Unless you apply quotation marks around a word, search will be "fuzzy" -- synonyms and related words can be matched. So a search for "run" (without the quotation marks) can return results for "running" and "race". If you need an exact match, use quotation marks around your search terms.
- The search results show all documents that match your query, with a sample of a few matching results highlighted. Click a document to open it, with the found terms highlighted. You can navigate through all matching elements in the document by clicking the up or down buttons.
Search within a single document
If you want to search for text within an open document, type Control+F (or click the Click the more options menu > Find) to search for letters or words in any language or character set.
Filter by person, place, and organization (entity)
You can filter your document list before or after a text search to show only documents that also contain one or more entities. Entities are people, places, and organizations found in the documents. You can see lists of all entities found in the collection in the Documents view page.
Click an entity in the list to add an entity filter. Remove an entity filter by clicking X next to the selected entity.
If an entity is not shown in the entity list of the main search box, it might mean one of two things:
- The entity wasn't found in the currently displayed list of documents. However, the entity might exist in other documents in the collection, if you are filtering by another entity, or are looking at search terms. The entity list shows only entities from the currently shown list of documents. Look at the full document list, without filters, to see if an entity appears in the collection.
- The entity is mentioned below a baseline number of times. Entities mentioned only once or twice in a collection won't be listed. Try a text search for very rarely mentioned entities.
- Pinpoint didn't identify the entity in the documents, but you might still try searching for the entity using text search.
Filter by labels
You can filter your search to include only documents with specified user-created labels. If you added any labels to your documents, you will see them listed near the entities in the Documents view.
Add label filters by clicking them in the label list, or remove them by clicking the X next to the created filter item. Note that the label list might change as you add labels; this is because the label list only includes labels that are present in the currently displayed set of documents.
Filter by date range
You can use date filters to show only documents in your collections that mention dates within a specific date range or on a specific date.
To make a selection, apply data range filters to the start and end date fields. To remove a selection, delete the date range.
- On the right, in the “Start date” and “End date” fields, add date values.
- Click Filter.
- You get documents based on the given dates.
- From the filtered list, select the document you want to open.
- To read the document, click the document in the list.
Tip: This feature is available for collections created after August 1, 2023.
Advanced search features
Here are some rules for fine-tuning your search terms.
Match all words
By default, Pinpoint requires all search terms to appear in a document. Therefore a search for "cats dogs" (without the quotation marks) will require both "cats" and "dogs" to appear in the same document. If you want to see documents containing either "cats" or "dogs," you must use "OR" or "|" as described next.
Match any of a list of words or phrases
Use the keyword "OR" or the sign "|" between any two phrases in order to find documents that include any of the two.
For example, results for the search jaguar OR lama will include all documents where either of these words appear. The same is true for the search jaguar | lama.
Match words and concepts
Pinpoint understands concepts and grammar, and it will automatically search for synonyms, plurals, different forms of the verb, and even the same word in other languages. For example: If you search for "car," Pinpoint will find documents with the words "cars" (plural) or "vehicle" or "automobile" (synonyms) or "voiture" (translation). Note that cross language matching is less exact.
Find exact matches
Surround any part of your search query with quotation marks (" ") in order to find exact matches. For example, results for the search "run" will only match "run" and not "running" or "runs".
Note that punctuation is generally ignored, even within quotation marks. For example "blue: (tiger)" will match "blue tiger", "blue-tiger", "blue, tiger", and so on. However some punctuation, such as '|' and '-', are interpreted as search operators.
Exclude a word or phrase
Use a minus sign (-) in front of any word or quoted phrase to exclude from your search. For example, results for the search jaguar speed -car will not include documents where the word "car" appears.
Case-sensitivity
Searches are not case-sensitive.
Single character search and unknown word searches
Searches for a single character are, by default, exact matches. That is, searches for "a" will not match "animal", but will match the "A" in the phrase "A long day".
Strings of letters that aren't recognized as an entity or word will also default to exact matches (that is, "asdf" will only match that exact string in a document; it won't match "asdfs" or "asdfasdf").
Regular expressions
Pinpoint does not support regular expression (wildcard) searches.