Boolean searching -- the operators AND, AND NOT, OR

Sometimes when you search, you want to make certain that all words in your search appear, or perhaps you want results where certain words do not appear. Using Boolean is the answer.

Let's say that you want all sites that sell yellow shirts. If you type in yellow shirts and search, you receive sites that sell shirts, sites that have something yellow and other sites that do sell yellow shirts.

AND

Using the operator AND will allow you to search for sites that have pages with both words. In this example, we'd type in "yellow AND shirt". The search engines that support Boolean logic will not search for the word AND to be in the page. It's only used to give the search engine instructions.

OR

What if we are willing to also accept green shirts? Using the word OR is the answer. Our search is now "yellow OR green AND shirts". This tells the search engines "I'm looking for a shirt that is either yellow or green. Give me all sites with yellow shirts, all sites with green shirts and all sites with both."

AND NOT

In our search results we are also getting shirts with pockets. We don't want a pocket in our shirt so how do we trim down the results? By using AND NOT. Now our search phrase looks like this

yellow OR green AND shirts NOT pockets

This will eliminate any pages that have the word pockets. Of course this isn't perfect because some site could have the phrase "for shirts with pockets, we recommend..." but we'll learn how to deal with issues like this in future lessons.