This article contains tables listing and describing data property keywords and values that can be used, along with common search operators, to narrow your search results. There are also sections describing more advanced search methods and formatting.

This article is aimed at administrators, support managers and agents with full access to the data in Zendesk Support.

This article includes the following topics on advanced search methods:

Search terms and terminology
Searching for properties that contain no data
Searching by date and time
Sorting search results
Search FAQ

This article includes the following reference tables:

Search operators
User property keywords
Organization property keywords

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.

Search terms and terminology

Search terms

Search terms are user-defined words, phrases, or values. Examples:

3245227
Greenbriar
serial number
"Jane Doe"

Search terms are case-insensitive. For example, "App" and "app" return the same results.

A single-word search term returns a result if it appears in the data as follows:

a single word
a single word in a longer phrase
the prefix of a longer word

The search term will not return a result if it appears in the data as follows:

in the middle of a word
at the end of a word

For example, the search term "top" would match "top", "top tier", "Top Ten Trucking", "Tip-Top Mops", "Big Top Entertainment", and "Dessert Toppings, Inc". It would not match "Desktop Solutions" or "One-Stop Publishing".

Search terms can consist of multiple words. Enclose the words in double quotes if you want the search to only return exact matches. Example: "Jane Doe". You can omit the quotes, in which case search reverts to AND matching logic. In other words, all the words must be present in the record in any order for a match. For example, searching for the following phrase returns results only if all the words are present, in any order.

Please upgrade my account

Property keywords

You can narrow your results by combining property keywords with search terms and operators. Example:

status<solved

A property keyword is the name of a property in a ticket, a user, an organization, or a group. Examples:

assignee
created
name

See the following property keyword references for all the properties and details about each:

User property keywords
Organization property keywords

Example property searches:

Search	Property keyword	Returns
priority>normal	priority	Tickets with a priority of high or urgent
subject:2fa	subject	Tickets with the search term 2fa in the subject
email:jdoe@example.com	email	The user with the email jdoe@example.com

Some properties have predefined values. For example, the ticket status property has the following predefined values: new, open, pending, hold, solved, closed. You can only search by these values. Example search: status:open. See the property keyword references for details about each property.

Other properties accept user-defined search terms. Example: subject:2fa. The same matching rules apply for property searches with the exception of prefix matching. Results are not returned if the search term appears as the prefix of a longer word. For example, the search term "tier" would return results for "tier 1" and "tier 2" but not "tiered".

You can search for multiple values of a single property by including the property keyword multiple times in a query. Example:

tags:silver tags:bronze

Search uses OR logic for matching in this case. The previous example returns results that contain either the tag "silver" or the tag "bronze".

Example search

The following search expression looks for anything with the tag "vip" that was created before May 1, 2019:

tags:vip created<2019-05-01

How it works:

tags is a property keyword indicating you're searching only within a specific data property, in this case a tag.
: is the "equal to" operator indicating the tag property value needs to be equal to the subsequent search term. Note that there's no space before or after the :.
vip is the search term.
created is a property keyword indicating you're searching the created data property for items created relative to a certain date.
< is the "less than" operator indicating you're searching for records created before a certain date.
2015-05-01 is a search term indicating the date you want to use.

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 4, 2014 at midnight (UTC):

created>2014-08-01T23:59:00Z created<2014-08-04T23:59:59Z

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

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.

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.

Search operators

You can use the following search operators 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

User property keywords

Here's the list of user properties that can be searched.

Keyword	Description
`name`	The user's partial or full name. name:"alex anderson"
`role`	The user's designated role. role:admin
`email`	Specify the user's email address, or specify `none` to search for users without an email address. email:alex@mondocam.com
`group`	The user's group name. This only applies to admin and agent users. group:"Level 2"
`organization`	Specify the user's organization name or ID, or specify `none` to search for users without an organization. If the user belongs to more than one organization, searching on any of those organizations will return their profile. organization:mondocam
`created`	The date the user was added to your Zendesk. created<2011-05-01 For more information on using date and time in your search, see Searching by date and time.
`notes`	All text in the notes field in the user's profile. notes:"manager"
`details`	All text in the details field in the user's profile. details:"madison, wi"
`external_id`	Specify the user's external ID, if used, or specify`none` to search for users without an external ID. external_id:0098884412
`phone`	Specify the user's phone number, or specify `none` to search for users without a phone number. phone:555-111-2222
`tags`	Specify tags on the user's profile, or specify `none` to search for users without tags. tags:premium tags:wholesale
`customfield`	Custom user fields. plan_type:platinum
`is_verified`	Search for users with or without verified email using `true` or `false`. To search for users with a verified email address: is_verified:true To search for users without a verified email address: is_verified:false
`is_suspended`	Search for users that are and aren't suspended using `true` or `false`. To search for suspended users: is_suspended:true To search for users that aren't suspended: is_suspended:false
`whatsapp`	Search for users based on a WhatsApp phone number.

Organization property keywords

Here's the list of organization properties that can be searched.

Keyword	Description
`name`	The organization's partial or full name. name:mondocam
`created`	The date the organization was added. created<2011-05-01
`notes`	All text in the notes field in the user's profile. notes:EMEA
`details`	All text in the details field in the organization's profile. details:london
`tags`	Specify tags that have been added to the organization, or specify `none` to search for organizations without tags. tags:premium
`customfield`	Custom organization fields. plan_type:platinum