Using Zendesk Support advanced search

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
• 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

Performing an advanced search

You can perform an advanced search from your Zendesk agent interface.

To perform an advanced search

1. 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.
2. Enter your search terms, using the terminology, operators, and formatting described in the sections below.  
3. Hit Enter.
4. When the search results appear, click the Tickets, Users, Articles, or Organizations tab to filter the results.

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 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.

Note: It can take a few minutes for Zendesk 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 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.

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. "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. If you have the Zendesk Agent Workspace enabled on your account, you can also search live chat and messaging conversations, but it can take 10 to 12 minutes before a conversation is 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
  • 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.