Boolean searches on WikiAnswers
July 1st, 2008 . by Shaya
Search on WikiAnswers is now better than ever, but it can still be difficult to find exactly what you’re looking for. Here are some useful search tips from one of our local gurus. The words in double quotes are your search terms — what you type into the search box.
Typing:
“new car”
will search for the exact match of the whole string “new car” (like Google does)…
Next:
“new” “car”
will search for any question that contains both “new” AND “car” (regardless of whether they appear next to each other or in that order), but any question that contains only one of these words will not be in the results list…
You can combine this search with a some kind of OR-based search… For example:
“general motors” vehicle
will search for the whole string “general motors” and also for the word “vehicle”. Results that contain the word “vehicle” will come first, but if the word “vehicle” is not found, you’ll still see results for “general motors”…
And this query is more complicated:
“car” “ford” new
It will search for the questions that contain both “car” and “ford” and may also contain the word “new”. Results that contain the word “new” will come first, but if the word “new” is not found, you’ll still see results for “car” AND “ford”…
And of course you can use the old OR-based search just by typing:
new car
And this will give you all the questions with at least one of the words (while the questions that contain BOTH words will come first in the list).
So, in short: putting a word or a search term into quotes makes the search term mandatory, while any unquoted word stays optional (but the results containing the most optional words will come first in the search results list)…
That’s all ;) Happy searching!
