On a listserv today a question came up about searching against the TITLE field in Verity collections. Turns out the answer was a bit complex since the docs (imho) are a bit unclear on this. Let me try to clear it up. (And I want to thank Tom Jordahl for helping me out with this information!)

First off - let's tackle exactly what is being returned in Verity searches in the query column. There are two possible values. First is Verity's built-in attempt to get a TITLE value. So for example, if you let Verity index HTML documents, then the TITLE tag will come from the title html tags. Each document type will have it's own potential title value.

However - when using CFINDEX you can also specify a TITLE value that overrides the built in value.

So.... all clear now? Now for the fun part. How do you search against this value? The docs seem to say that you can use a field search using either cf_title or title, but that isn't the case. If you want to search against Verity's TITLE value, you use title. You only use cf_title to search against a value you entered yourself.

As for how to perform the search, here is an example:

As a reminder, I'll be talking Verity at CFUNITED this year. I hope to see you there!