The Search facility pre-indexes topic text to achieve good performance. Search terms can consist of a single word or a phrase; the phrase search is implemented by successively ANDing the search terms. The search results can be refined by using Boolean operations with additional terms.
The user enters the search term in a box on the second row of the navigation-control table; if the term begins with a forward slash, /, it is processed as a JavaScript regular expression (regex). The user selects a Boolean operator by clicking a radio button on the third row: New for a fresh search, AND, OR, or NOT. The user clicks Find to the right of the text box to populate the navigation pane with a heading that lists the terms used in the search, followed by the search results, which consist of topic titles linked directly to their topics.
When a found topic link is clicked, the topic displays in the right pane with the search terms found highlighted; by default, the highlighting is a yellow background color, but the CSS style to be used for it can be set in the .ohx file with ftsHighlightStyle.
To find out what search terms are useful, the user can click List to the left of the text-entry box, to populate the navigation pane with a list of all available search terms. Each term is followed by a number in parentheses that shows how many references to the term exist in the topic files. The terms listed are themselves links; clicking a term causes that term to be entered into the text box.
The last text entry, and the last Boolean setting, are both retained in persistent cookies until changed by the user. If there are no previous results to work with, the Boolean setting is automatically changed to New when the user clicks Find.