In addition to full text search, you can search using common search operators combined with data property keywords and values to narrow your results.
This article describes how Zendesk Support's advanced search works. It is aimed at administrators and managers with full access to the data in Zendesk Support, and should be used in conjunction with Zendesk Support search reference, which contains tables listing and describing the full set of keywords and values you can use when searching tickets, users, and the like.
If you're an agent, or want to know more about basic search, start with Searching the data in Zendesk Support and refer back to this reference article if you want to perform more advanced searches.
Topics covered in this article:
Beginning an advanced search
You can perform an advanced search from your Zendesk agent interface,
To begin an advanced search
- Click the Search icon (
) in the upper-right of the top toolbar.
- Hit Enter, or click Advanced search.
- Enter your search terms, using the information described in this section.
- When the search results appear, click the Tickets, Users, Articles, or Organizations tab to filter the 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 in your Zendesk Support instance that match the term "vip." For instance, if an organization has "vip" in its name, like "Midwest VIP Transportation" or "Viper Reptile Supplies," even if it does not have the VIP tag, it will appear in your search results.
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.
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 only returns results that contain both tags, "superman" and "is_awesome".
"tags:superman tags:is_awesome"
Search operators
The following search operators can be used to build your search statements.
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.
"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 tags: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
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.
created<2011-05-01
due_date>2010-01-10
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
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
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
orsort: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 have a verified email address.
To search for suspended users:
is_suspended:true
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.
- 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:- English
- French
- German
- Japanese
- Portuguese
- 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.
55 Comments
Aimee, I'm trying your instructions. I clicked on the search icon at the top-right of this page. But no "Advanced Search" link appears when I press <Enter>.
Hi Jim!
The "Advanced Search" option will appear within the agent interface not in Help Center.
Here it is in my account:
Does that work for you? :)
Dan, I'm not an agent. Where can I learn about search operators that end-users can use to search Knowledge Base and Community topics? Thanks.
Hey Jim,
Your question makes sense now!
The Help Center KB and Community search is a full-text search; there isn't a way to use search operators for searches here yet. Keywords or strings (encapsulated in quotes) can be used to search for content.
Jim - I'm working on an updated version of this article, and I'll keep your comments in mind. I'll try to clarify the who, what, and where of advanced searching so there's no (or less) room for confusion. Thanks!
Hi there,
Is is possible to configure columns displayed in the results? I'd like to include Organization in it, it would be great for us, but I couldn't find where to configure it.
Very nice feature though!
Hi All,
We are interested in learning how you, Zendesk customers, use the Zendesk search in your work to help us continue enhancing and improving this feature.
If you and your team are interested in sharing how search supports your work and are available for talking to us, please sign up using the form here. http://goo.gl/forms/IDuqGK20uu397YAb2
We will follow up from there if we find a match to our study. Due to limited resource available, we may not be able to cover all customers.
Thanks!
Having Organization (and maybe other customisable columns) in search results would be hugely beneficial for us too!
Why not available a filter sort organization name? i see only status, date(updated_at and created_at) and priority.
Can searches be saved/shared, or is that something only done via views?
Hi,
Do light agents have access to Advanced Search?
Can someone please confirm this urgently?
@Ali_Ayaz: check https://www.zendesk.com/apps/advanced-search/
Hey Jordan!
This is something that you would do with a View.
@Ali light agents should be able to use Advanced Search without any problems - it's not something that is restricted by role.
Hi,
I just wanna ask if there is a way that I can pass a keyword string in the url for the new zendesk url? because in the previous version it is possible to pass a keyword because we are using it in our integration but now I can't find any way to do it. Also, in Zendesk Application Framework, routeTo function doesn't support 'search' as tabId. It only supports ticket, user, and organization. so we can't use a search in our app. I hope there is an alternative to make search work programmatically. I know this too technical here but I can't find any solutions. I hope you can help me about this. Thank you.
Sincerely,
Austin
Hi there,
What is the syntax to search for tickets having several tags at the same time? The article mentions the implicit OR operator when you use a data property keyword multiple times in a query, is it possible to use an AND?
Many thanks,
Nadia
Hello Nadia,
Great question! We have another article on advanced search that covers that topic as well as other advanced searches here: Zendesk Support search reference
There is a subsection in that article that covers tag searches which i'll add a screenshot of here:
So to find tickets that include multiple tags just surround the tags you want to search for in quotes after the colon. So let's say you wanted to find all tickets that contained these 3 tags "lion", "tiger", and "bear" You would format your search as tags: "lion tiger bear"
Thanks again for the great question and I hope that helps!
Thank you, Stephen. It does answer my question and it does work.
I see now why you don't allow spaces in the tag names :)
Thanks again,
Nadia
Do you know if we can search for tickets based on a list with email addresses?
Hi Maria -
Can you clarify the "list" part of your question? You can enter an email address in the search bar and it will pull up tickets tied to that email.
Hi Nicole,
If we have a list of let's say 10 email addresses can we do a multiple search if there are tickets from some of these emails?
Hi Maria! Sorry for the delayed response!
Based on my testing, it's not possible to search multiple email addresses at the same time. Can you tell me more about what you're trying to do here? There might be another way of getting what you need.
Hi Jessie,
I would like to copy 10 email addresses from an CSV file, paste them in the Zendesk search, use the status filter and all tickets from these emails under the selected status to display.
thanks,
Maria
Hi Jessie and Nicole,
I just wanted to ask if it is possible to pass the keyword search in the url? so that when agent opens the page the search bar is already prepolutated with the keyword search and agent can see all the result based on keyword search.
In the previous Zendesk agent search bar it is possible to do this and we are using it but old agent interface is now removed and we can't do the same thing. I hope it's still possible.
Thank you.
Austin
Hi Maria! Sorry for the delayed response!
Thanks for the additional info! The only way you're really going to be able to pull this information would be to get it using our API. You can find our documentation here. This is more advanced functionality, but we have Dev areas in the Community where you can get additional help!
Hello Austin,
Because of some of the changes we've made to the platform, we had to adjust how the search function works. In order to accommodate some of the more complicated features, it meant that the "search=" url had to be removed.
Currently, the only url search that can be done would be accomplished using our API, https://developer.zendesk.com/rest_api/docs/core/search.
All the best,
Patrick Bosmans | Tier 1 Customer Advocate
Hi Patrick,
Thanks for the response. I understand that Zendesk made a lot of change but is there any way in the future that this feature will be available also?
Also the search api, I don't think I can use because it returns json object but thanks.
I hope it will be possible for future changes to make this feature available again. Also, I think many people will find it useful also.
Thanks,
Austin
Austin,
Currently this feature is not on our roadmap for development.
We do have a sidebar search app that might fit your workflow, https://www.zendesk.com/apps/support/sidebar-search/.
I might also suggest posting in our Product Feedback Forum. The more eyes that see this type of request and upvote it, the more likely our Dev team will look to bring it into Production.
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/topics/200132066-Product-feedback
All the best,
Patrick | Tier 1 Customer Advocate
Any idea when the search functionality will be improved?
There was a search beta awhile back that was canceled. Will those features in the beta search like a unified search results page that could be filtered by category ever actually be implemented?
Or how about partial word searching?
Or smart searching that corrects misspellings?
Hi Chris -
We have two new engineers working on search functionality. Just today I provided them a list of all of the Community and Knowledge Base conversations on functionality.
We don't have any specifics yet on what they will be building or when things will be rolled out, but they will hopefully start to be outlining those things in the next development sprint or two.
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