You Might Be Using Boolean Operators Wrong. But That’s Easy to Fix!

Anyone who learns how to search online, at some point learns the use of Boolean operators – AND, OR, NOT. If they learn further, they learn about proximity operators too

But interestingly this is a tool often highly misused. Either due to lack of knowledge, or plain human error. The latter happens less as one practices. But if one repeatedly does wrong searches due to lack of knowledge, then it leads to long term mistakes in searching as it becomes a habit!

I have even observed medical teachers transfer such wrong learning and students naturally trust them because they are otherwise excellent subject teachers!

Let us learn some simpler methods of remembering how to use AND, OR, and NOT correctly. In ALL cases, remember that you are searching for keywords IN articles (not for physical articles about your keywords).

Boolean operator AND – Remember:

1. 1. When you search – Cold AND Cough – you are searching for
   – Articles that contain the words – cold and cough together
   – Not for articles about cold and cough
2. When you search using AND – you get less “counts”. That is the opposite of how you think in English – where you get more results if you think of the word AND
3. Just remember “together” for AND

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Boolean operator OR – Remember:

1. When you search – Cold OR Cough – you are searching for
   – Articles that contain either the word cold, or the word cough or both words
   – Not for articles that contain only one of these
2. When you search using OR – you get more “counts”. That again is the opposite of how you think in English – where you get less results if you think of the word AND
3. Just remember “everything” for OR

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Boolean operator NOT – Remember:

1. When you search –  Cold NOT Cough – you are searching for
   – Articles that contain the word cold. Inside this set – you do not want the ones that contain cough.
2. When you search using NOT – you get less “counts” That is easy!
3. But remember one important thing, when you search Cold NOT Cough – you might miss some important information about – Cold!
4. Usually the NOT operator is not used in topic searches. It is used to with search results – Example – from your results you may want to remove items that are not in English language.

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Proximity operators

These are used to find words near each other. Usually it means words separated by n number of words – where n means numbers upto a maximum of six words. And the words could be in any order. But… we will save that for another blog post!

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