Boolean logic was developed by a man called George Boole, who was an English mathematician in the 1800s. The concept of Boolean searching was developed by this very man. Boolean search is supported by almost off of search engines and online databases. It is used to cut down extra documents that might appear during a normal search.
Boolean search is extremely easy to use. Actually, you might be using it already! Boolean logic is just the word that is used to define the operations on combination of various terms that you type in search engines or directories.
Some of the operations of Boolean logic are as follows:
- AND: This operation allows you to narrow down your search. For example, suppose you have typed England AND Portugal on a search engine. Now, the search engine will show you the pages which have both England and Portugal in them. The pages where only England or only Portugal appears will not be shown.
- OR: This operation allows the broadening of your search. For example, if you type England OR Portugal, all the pages with the words either England or Portugal will be shown to you.
- NOT: This operation allows you to narrow down your search. For example, if you type England NOT Portugal, all the pages which have the word England, but not Portugal will be shown.
At times, not all of your searches would follow the Boolean logic. This is because not all the search engines support Boolean logic. But you will not face this problem very often because most of the search engines do support Boolean terms. If you do not know if your search engine supports Boolean terms, you can always check out the Frequently Asked Questions on the homepage.
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