Badke does a great job of deciphering search engines and how they work. This chapter of the text is full of very useful information. I actually read it twice. I knew that with your typical search engine, such as Google, it was possible to do an “AND” search and an “OR” search. Combining the two had never really occurred to me much less the addition of “NOT”, Whoooo! hold them there horses! Are we learning a new, better way surf the net? I particularly found useful Badke’s information on hierarchies and how paying attention to them can enhance your search results. I think that we all subconsciously use some sort of hierarchy when doing research but approaching research deliberately from this angle I found to be something that I have yet to try.
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I just searched Yahoo search Boolean operators and discovered that Yahoo! no longer supports full Boolean searching. Searchers can use the + or – signs to require or exclude search terms. When Google introduced Google+ it dropped support for the plus sign operator. Are the preferences of advanced “power searchers” being ignored? ~Prof. L.
According to Google Help the advanced search functions are used less than 5% of the time, even by advanced searchers. (http://support.google.com) Yahoo probably views discontinuing some support for these functions as streamlining their search program in order to stay competitive. It’s hard to speculate on Yahoo’s reasoning because the “OR” operator is still in tact although nesting is not possible and the “AND” operator is initiated automatically between two keywords. (http://help.yahoo.com) I think that Google and Yahoo are just trying the produce the best and fastest search engine by trimming a little fat.