Siebel Search Administration Guide > Overview of Search Setup and Maintenance >

The Differences Between Search and Find Operations

Find is a powerful tool that consists of a direct query on a database and allows users to query on a field by field basis. Find is accessible from anywhere in your Siebel application, and allows users to perform queries on specific predefined fields linked to specific business components (such as querying for an employee last name). Since Find directly queries the database instead of using indices, the results of these queries always match with the actual data in the database. This makes Find appropriate for searching on transactional database tables that frequently are changing.

A Search operation by contrast, allows a simpler, broader search by not requiring the user to specify the business component or field to search upon. Full text searches can be performed across multiple business components and files with one operation. An important difference between search and find is the visibility applied to the results. See Visibility Control for details on the differences.