What is Boolean Searching?

If you are new to the internet, you may have heard about Boolean searching. In this article, we are going to look at what Boolean searching means and where it came from. Boolean searching is important to understand if you do research, or if you want to become an effective internet searcher. Boolean searching provides people with ways to bring data together, and to separate data. If you understand Boolean search tools, you can find anything. If it's out there, anyway.

What is Boolean Searching?

Boolean searching is named after the nineteenth century mathematician George Boole. Obviously, computers were not around in Boole's day. Instead, it is his concept of logic and logical relationships that has been adapted to a modern application.

How to Use Boolean Searching

You are probably already using Boolean searching, whether you know it or not. Boolean searching most frequently uses the terms AND, OR, and NOT. As stated earlier, these terms aggregate or separate terms and ideas to help you find what you are really looking for. Here are some examples:

The words college and university are used interchangeably. I want to look for colleges in Alaska. I might search for: college OR university AND Alaska

Here are some other examples:

Knitting AND patterns NOT crochet

Dogs OR cats AND fleas

Flea AND medications AND cats NOT dogs

Boolean searching is especially helpful since there is so much on the internet these days. A lot of it is great, but a lot of it is useless at any given moment. Boolean searching helps to hone in on exactly what you are looking for. If you are starting with a big idea, like quilting, you can modify your search to get what you want.

Today, quilting brings up 8,440,000 results. I am interested in Underground Railroad quilts.

Quilting AND underground railroad reduces my results to 158,000.

Much better, but I don't have time to look at that many entries. I can add more concepts. Let's look for free patterns. Quilting AND underground railroad AND free patterns gives 8650 results.

Now I have a lot to choose from. From here, I can add more if I want. I can add additional search terms to narrow my results even more: Beginner, Intermediate or Advanced, fabric types, historical quilts versus modern, etc.

Boolean searching tends to work better if you start with a broad concept and narrow it down until you find what you want. It doesn't have to work that way though. You can start out specific if you want, with a long search string. If that doesn't work, you can start over with broader terms.

Take some time to learn how Boolean searching works. It will make your life online a lot easier and save you time.