Proceedings of ICED

Boolean Searches

The following examples demonstrate some search strings that use boolean operators:

• design community
  Find rows that contain at least one of the two words.
• +design +community
  Find rows that contain both words.
• +design community
  Find rows that contain the word “design”, but rank rows higher if they also contain “community”.
• +design -community
  Find rows that contain the word “design” but not “community”.
• +design ~community
  Find rows that contain the word “design”, but if the row also contains the word “community”, rate it lower than if row does not.
• +design +(>community <decisions)
  Find rows that contain the words “design” and “community”, or “design” and “decisions” (in any order), but rank “design community” higher than “design decisions”
• design*
  Find rows that contain words such as “design”, “designs”, “designing”, or “designer”.
• "some words"
  Find rows that contain the exact phrase “some words” (for example, rows that contain “some words of wisdom” but not “some noise words”). Note that the " characters that enclose the phrase are operator characters that delimit the phrase. They are not the quotation marks that enclose the search string itself.