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Use full-text search when a reviewer needs to locate literal wording such as “material weakness,” a product name, or a defined accounting phrase. The route searches filing manifests and extracted sections. It is not semantic search, and an empty response does not establish that the issuer did not discuss the concept.

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Reader job: find exact language and preserve its source

Scope an exact-term query to an issuer and filing family where possible. Treat returned filing and section hits as a research queue, then retrieve the selected filing or section before displaying a quotation or conclusion.
q is required. Narrow with ticker or symbol, cik, form, accession_number, filing_year, issuer fiscal year fy or year, and date_from or date_to. limit ranges from 1 through 100 and is a combined search budget split between the filing and section legs; it is not a single globally paginated result list. The response includes object: "fulltext_search", the echoed query, filings, sections, requestId, and traceparent. Each leg has data and count. A section result can include degradedState when section-search capability is partially unavailable.

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Turn a result into evidence

For a content claim, prefer a section hit. Retain its filing identity, section key, source URL or provenance, query filters, and requestId, then fetch the section by accession:
A filing-manifest hit is useful for discovery but does not itself supply the passage supporting a statement. Open the SEC filing when tables, definitions, or surrounding qualifications affect the interpretation.

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Choose a different search path when needed

Use semantic search for related language that may not repeat your literal terms. Use filing search to select documents by metadata rather than text. Use section extraction when you already know the accession and item.

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Production caveats

  • ticker and symbol must agree when both are supplied.
  • A fiscal-year filter is not the same as a calendar filing-year filter: with an issuer, fy maps to that issuer’s fiscal filing window; filing_year selects a calendar filing year.
  • A non-2xx response or degradedState is an unavailable or partial retrieval condition, not a negative search result.
  • A snippet cannot substitute for reading the source filing, its tables, and its qualifiers.

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Next action

Test one literal phrase against one issuer and form, retain both result legs and request metadata, then retrieve the chosen source section before adding the workflow to a research or alerting product.