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Did Google remove the ability to do boolean searches? When I recently tried to do something like (word_a OR word_b), it tried to match on "(word_a" which was wr
by pmarreck 4y ago
Did Google remove the ability to do boolean searches? When I recently tried to do something like (word_a OR word_b), it tried to match on "(word_a" which was wrong
- dannysullivan 4y agoIn a Boolean like that, the command would be to match either of the words, A or B. But sometimes our ranking systems might find that A seems more relevant, so it could get weighted more. That's still a Boolean match, though. And you don't need to do that. By default, we'll search for any of the words (OR) that are entered.
- pmarreck 4y agoI thought the default search was AND? And that it only starts returning results that don't include a word if that word is rated low in relevance (possibly due to misspelling) and the number of results from the original search are low? (Which is literally what it says it's doing when you do such a search?)
- dannysullivan 4y agoAges ago, AND was the default. That was true of many search engines, too. I can't pin down when exactly we shifted to OR as the default, but it's been that way for years, probably over a decade easily.