# Query syntax


In fleet indexing, you use a query syntax to specify queries.

## Supported features


The query syntax supports the following features:
+ Terms and phrases
+ Searching fields
+ Prefix search
+ Range search
+ Boolean operators `AND`, `OR`, `NOT`, and `–`. The hyphen is used to exclude something from search results (for example, `thingName:(tv* AND -plasma)`).
+ Grouping
+ Field grouping
+ Escaping special characters (such as with *\$1*)
+ Leading wildcard use is limited to 1 query term per query. For example, you cannot search for `thingName:*my` and `thingGroupNames:*echo` in the same query. Queries that include a leading wildcard have a max query length of 100 characters.
**Note**  
 Accounts with a Fleet Indexing query API limit exceeding 30 requests per second are subject to throttling when using leading-wildcard query terms. This 30 requests-per-second limit applies at the account level across all Fleet Indexing query APIs. 

## Unsupported features


The query syntax doesn't support the following features:
+ Regular expressions
+ Boosting
+ Ranking
+ Fuzzy searches
+ Proximity search
+ Sorting
+ Aggregation
+ Special characters: ```, `@`, `#`, `%`, `\`, `/`, `'`, `;`, and `,`. Note that `,` is only supported in geoqueries.

## Notes


A few things to note about the query language:
+ The default operator is AND. A query for `"thingName:abc thingType:xyz"` is equivalent to `"thingName:abc AND thingType:xyz"`.
+ If a field isn't specified, AWS IoT searches for the term in all the registry, Device Shadow, and Device Defender fields.
+ All field names are case sensitive.
+ Search is case insensitive. Words are separated by white-space characters as defined by Java's `Character.isWhitespace(int)`.
+ Indexing of Device Shadow data (unnamed shadows and named shadows) includes reported, desired, delta, and metadata sections.
+ Device shadow and registry versions aren't searchable, but are present in the response.
+ The maximum number of terms in a query is twelve.
+ The special character `,` is only supported in geoqueries.