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:
Performing an advanced search
You can perform an advanced search from your Zendesk agent interface.
To perform an advanced search
- Click the Search icon (
) in the upper-right of the top toolbar. You can also hover your mouse over the +Add button and choose Search from the drop-down menu.
- Enter your search terms, using the terminology, operators, and formatting described in the sections below.
- Hit Enter.
- 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 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 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 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
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:- Brazilian Portuguese
- Dutch
- English
- French
- German
- Italian
- Japanese
- Korean
- 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.
68 Comments
I'm having the same problem as Erin: Advanced search used to be available via the search box but now its not.
I frequently used advanced search this way as we have a lot of account numbers that coincidentally are ticket numbers--the basic search ALWAYS returns the ticket , so I'd gotten in the habit of performing the advanced search when I needed to search by account number.
Now that this is gone, I have to search by something intentionally vague i.e. the name "Jane" just to get the advanced search to appear.
Is the fact that the advanced search is missing from the search box intentional??
Hi, Erin and Lila.
The newly-updated search lets you use advanced search operators and terminology in the default search box -- you don't have to select Advanced Search to use them. If that's not happening, you can reply here or file a support ticket and we'll try to figure out why not.
This article was updated a couple weeks ago to reflect the new functionality. If you're still not seeing the updated text, you may need to clear your cache.
Erin, I am looking into the direct-to-ticket search results and will update when I learn more about it.
Thanks!
Thanks Aimee Spanier--I see the info in the article I just wasn't clear the old/familiar way to get to the advanced search screen was purposefully removed.
From what I can see, there is a way to specifically search both the user and organization (using type:user or type:organization OR both of these after the numeric search term). My issue is that this is much more complicated than it used to be :(
I'm trying to do a search for users whose email addresses are verified/unverified but it's not working. When I search for:
All my users show up in the results even though most of them are NOT verified. When I search for:
None of my users show up even though most of them are NOT verified.
Hello Kevin Tauber,
After consulting a couple specialists on this and testing in a few different test accounts, we did confirm the "is_verified:true" and false work as expected in our accounts. What I would like to do is take this into a ticket so we can troubleshoot further with you there and dig into potential account specific issues with you.
You will receive an email shortly notifying you the ticket was created and I will follow up there with additional questions.
I hope that helps! I will talk to you in the ticket soon!
Hello again Kevin Tauber and Community,
I wanted to follow up here to close the loop on what we found in the ticket. When searching for "is_verified:true" you will see all users with a verified identity. This includes a verified phone number or other identity so it is not specifically limited to users with verified email addresses.
We've updated the article with that correction and clarification to now read this:
"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."
I hope that helps clear up confusion!
Is it possible to search for tickets based on received at /sent to email
Hello Rawan Dwairi
It is possible to search for tickets based on received at email, but only for tickets sent to one of your Zendesk support addresses. This unfortunately does not work for any emails sent to any external email addresses you have set up.
The term you're looking for is "recipient". You can see the details in the screenshot below from this article: Zendesk Support search reference
If you are looking to sort out tickets for an external address, you could try the work around of creating a View based on the support address using the "received at" condition. See more in this article: Creating views to manage ticket workflow.
I hope that helps!
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