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Boolean Logic is a way of using AND, OR, or NOT to include or exclude terms in a search statement. Normally, the default connector between more than one word is AND.
How does Boolean Logic work and how does it influence your search results? Suppose you had to watch two film versions of Hamlet and there were four films available? In the first scenario, demonstrating AND, you have to watch the Kenneth Branagh version AND the Sir Laurence Olivier version.
In the second scenario, you have a choice of watching either the Kenneth Branagh version OR the Sir Laurence Olivier version which means your choices are expanded because you can watch both of those two versions or either of those versions plus another version.
In the last example, let's suppose that you can watch any two versions that you like but NOT the Mel Gibson version. In this case, your choices are more limited than they are with OR but broader than they are with AND.
Boolean Symbols
Sometimes you can use symbols for AND and NOT instead of the words.
Wildcards
Wildcard symbols are also known as truncation symbols. These are used in place of letters in a word in order to search for variations of a word. These symbols vary from database to database and from search engine to search engine. Usually you can find out what wildcards a system uses by looking under "Help".
Phrases
Phrases are generally put in "", for example, "Tennessee Williams" so that the system knows to search for the name and not the separate words. Even if you searched for Tennessee AND
Williams, you might retrieve results where the separate words occur and not the phrase. For example, you might retrieve an article about Serena Williams appearing in Tennessee.
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