Topic: Asking for help from someone who knows Boolean.

[Caeli]

I have little to no experience with Boolean, and need a quick introductory session on how to write a Boolean search string. If you can help me, please contact me on one of my messengers (available in my profile). Thanks!

[Vekseid]

Erm. Are you asking about boolean operators, boolean algebra, a boolean search on Google or a Sphinx search engine like ours, or?

[Caeli]

I think it's just a Boolean search string. Is it something as simple as

Software developer AND Java AND California ?

[Oniya]

That's pretty much it.  If you want to find all of the search items, use 'and'.  If you want to find at least one, use 'or'.  You can do fancy things by introducing 'not' and parenthesis, but the example you gave is a basic Boolean search.

[Caeli]

Oh, awesome. I thought I was going to have to learn some crazy programming. =___=

Thanks so much!

[Vekseid]

I think it's just a Boolean search string. Is it something as simple as

Software developer AND Java AND California ?

Boolean operators are
AND: Z = X AND Y, Z is true only if and only if both X and Y is true
OR: Z = X OR Y, Z is true if and only if one or both of X or Y is true
NOT: Z = NOT X, Z is true if and only if X is false
XOR: Z = X XOR Y, Z is true if and only if one, but not both, of X or Y is true (XOR means eXclusive OR)

Sometimes the NOT operator gets combined as a shorthand - NAND, NOR, and XNOR for NOT AND, NOT OR, and NOT XOR, respectively.

In many forms of input they will have their own characters representing them in shorthand

AND: Usually &
OR: Usually |, but sometimes ^ or +
NOT: !, ~, or -, placed directly before the term to be negated. "Software developer" & java -California
XOR: Usually ^

Search engines don't seem to implement XOR very often or very well. Google treats ^ as OR.


In programming, boolean operators take one of two forms - computations meant to return a logical value, as above, or bitwise operations to generate a new numerical value from one or two input values. Can do things like calculate power-of-2 math very, very quickly.

[Caeli]

Thanks for the explanation, Vekseid. :)

[Taymynx]

I sent you a PM with a few other boolean tools like the * search string and how letters are given numerical representations by a computer...allowing you to search words and versions using <, >, =, and null sets.  I added a few tutorial links. Would have put it here but it sounded like you wanted it sent 

but the ones Vek listed are the most commonly used one on in websearches other than the asterisk.

I hope it gave you added enrichment.

[Caeli]

The answers that Vekseid and Oniya gave me were sufficient for what I needed, but thank you for taking the time.