Using Zendesk Support advanced search




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In addition to full text search, you can perform an advanced search using common
search operators combined with data property keywords and values to narrow
your results.
Administrators can search everything and agents can search the tickets and users
that they have permission to see. Use this article in conjunction with the
Zendesk Support search reference, which
contains tables listing and describing the full set of keywords and values
you can use, to perform an advanced search.
Topics covered in this article:

Performing an advanced
search
Advanced search terms and
terminology
Search
operators
Searching for properties
that contain no data
Searching by date and
time
Sorting search
results
Using the 'type'
keyword
Suspended and verified users
Search FAQ

Related articles:
Searching the data in Zendesk
Support
Saving Zendesk
Support searches




Performing an advanced search

You can perform an advanced search in Zendesk Support.
To perform an advanced search



In Support,
click the Search icon ( ) in the upper-right of
the top toolbar. You can also hover your mouse
over the +Add button, then select
Search from the drop-down menu.
Your
most recent searches and viewed content appear in
a menu. See Accessing your
recent searches to learn more.

Enter your search terms, using the terminology,
operators, and formatting described in the sections
below.
When the search results appear, click the
Tickets, Users, Articles, or
Organizations tab to filter the results. If you anticipate performing this
search often, you may want to save it so
that it's easily accessible.

If you currently have a ticket open and the
similar tickets
feature is turned on, filtering by
Tickets shows you a Similar tickets
header that includes any tickets related to the
ticket you’re currently working on, if
applicable.
If you’ve turned on AI agent
tickets, for the initial suggested results,
the tooltip below the ticket subject says either
AI agent or Agent.







Note: Due to API rate
limits, advanced search returns only the
first 1,000 results.




Advanced search terms and terminology

Advanced search allows you to narrow your results by using data
property keywords, operators, and search
terms. In the context of an advanced search:



Data property keywords indicate that you are
restricting a search to one or more specific data
properties.

Operators are symbols used to modify the keywords
and focus the search.

Search terms are the words, phrases, or values
you are searching for.


Search terms can include any string, including user, organization, or
group names. For example, you can search for "vip" to list all users
tagged as VIPs. However, the results will also include other data
that match the term "vip." For instance, if an
organization has "vip" in its name, like "Midwest VIP
Transportation" or "Viper Reptile Supplies,", it will appear in your
search results even if it doesn't have the VIP tag.

Note: It can take a few minutes for Support to index new and modified
tickets, users, and other resources. If they don't appear in your
search results, wait a few minutes and try again.
The following is an example of a search string looking for anything with
the tag "vip" that was created before May 1, 2015:

tags:vip created<2015-05-01




tags is a keyword indicating you are searching
only within a specific data property, in this case a
tag.

: is an operator indicating the tag
property needs to match the subsequent search term.
Note that there is no space before or after the
:.

vip is the search term referred to by the prior
property/operator combination.

created is a keyword indicating you are searching
the created data property for items created
relative to a certain date.

< is an operator indicating you are searching
for users, tickets, organizations, or articles
created before a certain date.

2015-05-01 is a search term indicating the date
you want to use.


If submitting multiple search terms, search has a default AND behavior,
rather than an OR behavior. For example, searching for the following
phrase returns results only if all of the words are present,
in any order. Please upgrade my account

However, when you use a data property keyword multiple times in a query,
there is an OR search across the values you specified. The following
phrase returns results that contain either the tag "silver"
or the tag "bronze".

tags:silver tags:bronze

To perform an AND search on multiple data property keywords, wrap the
keywords in double quotes. The following phrase returns only results
that contain both tags, "superman" and "is_awesome".

tags:"superman is_awesome"




Search operators

The following search operators can be used to build your search
statements.



Table 1. Search operators






Operator
Description




:
The colon indicates that the given field should equal the specified
value. status:open



<
Less than. status<closed



>
Greater than. priority>normal



<=
Less than or equal to. status<=pending



>=
Greater than or equal to. priority>=normal



" "
Double quotes. In a simple keyword search, this is referred to as a
phrase search and returns the exact words in the exact order; however,
punctuation characters are not
included. "Please upgrade my account"

Note: In
the Japanese version of Support, this feature does not work as
expected. A simple keyword search that includes double quotes
returns results, but the results are not the exact words in the
exact order.
In a search including data
properties, use double quotes to perform an inclusive AND search,
returning results that include all properties in the search.

tags:"superman is_awesome"




-
Minus sign. Excludes items containing a word (or property value) from
the search results. For example, the following statement searches for
any tickets with the status 'pending', but excludes any tickets
containing the tag 'invoice' from the search results:
status:pending -tags:invoice



*
The wildcard operator is useful when you want to search various forms
of a word. For example, searching for photo* returns
results that would include photography, photographer, photograph and any
other words that began with 'photo'. However, because of the
performance issues involved with doing wildcard searches,
unqualified wildcard searches are not currently supported. In other
words, you need to use a property keyword to make your search
specific to the data you're trying to locate.
subject:photo*










Searching for properties that contain no data

Properties that contain no data can be searched for using
none as the search term, along with the
group, tags, via, organization,
or assignee keywords, as in this
example: assignee:none

This returns all unassigned tickets.



Searching by date and time

Date property keywords - created, updated, solved,
and due date) can be combined with search operators to return
data from a specific date, before a certain date, and after a
certain date. To search dates in any locale, use the format
YYYY-MM-DD. You can also use locale-specific formats such as
MM/DD/YYYY in the United States.
To search for data before a certain date, use the less than (<)
operator: created<2011-05-01

To search for data after a certain date, use the greater than (>)
operator: due_date>2010-01-10

To search for a specific date, use the equals (:)
operator: solved:2010-01-10

You can also use the <= or >= operators to indicate
less-than-or-equal-to and
greater-than-or-equal-to respectively.


Searching with combined dates and times

You can specify a combined date and time using ISO8601 syntax:
created>2015-09-01T12:00:00-08:00
updated<2015-09-01T12:00:00Z

The first example above searches for anything created after
September 1, 2015 at 12:00 p.m. (Pacific Standard Time).
The second example above searches for anything updated before
September 1, 2015 at 12:00 p.m. (UTC).



Searching within a date/time range

You can search within a date range, for example August 2, 2014
through August 4, 2014, using the following search
statement:
created>2014-08-01 created<2014-08-05

You can also include specific times in your search range. The
following example searches for anything created between
August 1, 2014 at 11:59 p.m. (UTC) and August 2, 2014 at
midnight (UTC):

created>2014-08-01T11:59:00Z created<2014-08-05T24:00:00Z




Searching with relative times

You can search for a time relative to the present time, using the
time units hours, minutes, days,
weeks, months, or years. The
following search returns anything created in the last four
hours:

created>4hours





Searching for tickets with a specific ticket form

You can search for a ticket form and get results for all tickets where
that ticket form is applied. For example, the following search
returns all tickets that use the Change Request ticket form:

form:"Change Request"




Sorting search results

You can sort your search results by field, in ascending or descending
order, using the following keyword phrases:


order_by:field


sort:asc or
sort:desc


Sorting is available on the following fields:


created
commented
priority
status
ticket_type


Using the order_by and sort keywords is
equivalent to using the API parameters sort_by and
sort_order.



Using the 'type' keyword

For API searches, one of the tools you have available for narrowing your
search results is the type keyword. It is
used to explicitly declare that you want to search for one of the
following types:


ticket
user
organization
group
article (Help Center)
entry or topic (forums)


Using the type keyword means that you are explicitly
searching on the type you specify. For example, you can search for
all the users that belong to the customer's organization using this
search statement:

type:user organization:customers

If you instead searched for organization:customers you
would also get all the tickets that have requesters who belong to
this organization. This is because searches that do not explicitly
specify type return results for all types, including tickets (and
organization is a ticket property).
Using type:user, your search returns all users that
belong to the Customers organization. So, you're narrowing your
search to the user type and excluding tickets.
While organizations and groups are properties of the user object, they
have their own properties that can be searched as well. The
following query allows you search only for organization tags,
excluding tags of the same name that may be used in other elements
of Zendesk Support such as tickets and forum topics.

type:organization tags:premium




Suspended and verified users

You can search for users based on whether or not they are suspended, and
whether or not they are verified. Users with any verified identity,
not just an email address, are included in the search results. For
example, users with verified phone numbers are listed.

To search for suspended users:
is_suspended:true
To search for verified users:
is_verified:true




Search FAQ




How soon can new data be searched? When you add
new data to Zendesk Support, it typically takes
about a minute before it's indexed and can be
searched. It can take 10
to 12 minutes before live chat and
messaging conversations are indexed.



How does punctuation affect search? Punctuation
characters are generally not included in
searches.


Are there limitations to wildcard searches? You
can only do wildcard searches when combined with
property keywords
(subject:photo*). The wildcard
must go at the end of the search term.


Who can search what? Administrators can search
all the data in Zendesk Support. Agents can search
the data that they've been granted access to.
End-users can do full text searches of the
knowledge base.


What languages are supported?
There is language-specific support for searching
in the following languages:
Brazilian Portuguese
Dutch
English
French
German
Italian
Japanese
Russian
Spanish


The support includes dictionary-based
tokenization for Japanese because words are not
separated by spaces in that language. For the
other languages, the language-specific support is
primarily stemming, which allows different forms
of the same word to match. In particular, the
singular and plural forms of a word will generally
match.





