Where did Boolean search functions go?

<waves tiny fist>

Back in the day when searches were all done in the library, after card catalogs were made electronic and before the internet, we could limit or expand search results using AND, OR, and NOT.

Nearly every time I do a search in a retail setting or a search engine setting, there are tons of results and most of them are not what I want. But adding more words to the search yields all of those results plus results that might somehow match the new words. It’s frustrating and a waste of time.

I’m here to ask all the coders: reunite us with the Boolean operators. Please!

(Surely I’m not the only one?)

2 thoughts on “Where did Boolean search functions go?”

  1. Some operators do work. Using a minus sign before a search term to eliminate those results. I use this all the time to -Pinterest. I do a lot of searches that are art or craft related and Pinterest comes up all the time. But I HATE Pinterest results because they are usually just a picture and not linked back to the original source. So I -Pinterest on almost every search. Also putting a word in “quotes” requires that word to be in your search results.

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