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What is Boolean Logic?
The name, 'Boolean', is named after the British mathematician George Boole.
When search engines look for information, they use the principles of Boolean logic. Boolean logic is a way of using logical relationships among search terms.
Boolean logic is simple and consists of the three following logical operators:
- AND - eg. Search for dog AND cat
- OR - eg. Search for dog OR cat
- NOT - eg. Search for dog NOT cat
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Example 1
Let's say we want to look-up information about the 'Saddle Club' show or books but not anything to do with Saddle shops.
If we search for:
The search comes back with Saddle Club sites from all over the world.
Most search engines assume we mean AND between any two words, and some will also go on to look for OR between the two words. So the above search will report a huge number of sites that relate to Saddle AND Club. |
Most search engines will list all of the pages that have both words first, then all of the pages that contain either one of the words. That is a very big list!
One way to narrow the search would be to put quotation marks on either side of the phrase "Saddle Club". This way you will only get the pages which contain that EXACT phrase, instead of pages that contain one or other of the words as well.
Searching for "Saddle Club" will give you a list of these sites from around the world, but What we really want is Saddle Club information in Australia.
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