A quick on-line search for George Boole will reveal that he lived from 1815-1864 AND that he is considered to be one of the founders of the field of computer science.  (This is not a typo – and please note the emphasis on the word and.)

Many of us may not immediately grasp the connection between this 19th Century mathematician and the evolution of the modern computer, but the link is very real, AND potentially helpful if NOT amazingly so, OR so it seems.  Any idea what this is referring to yet?

Boolean searches can help you find just about any information that you are looking for on the internet, or at least help you find the tools to get you there.  Is this important to your business?  The short answer is yes.

The right stuff
Information is a very broad and far-reaching word.  What type of information will help your business?  You know best, but there can be no doubt that finding the right information will lead to greater efficiency, OR bigger returns, AND more clients AND NOT frustration.

The essence of what George Boole accomplished was to formulate a system for expressing logical relationships.  This is the backbone of what drives modern computer operations and also the key to performing targeted searches using those modern computers.  There is no need to read his “AN INVESTIGATION OF THE LAWS OF THOUGHT, ON WHICH ARE FOUNDED THE MATHEMATICAL THEORIES OF LOGIC AND PROBABILITIES” (1854) in order to take advantage of some of his genius.  All you need to do is remember the words/phrases AND, OR, AND NOT.  (And don’t forget to use parentheses.)

Many search engines work with Boolean principles.  They are based on sets of logic and that can be a great help to you the next time you need to find specific information. 

Proceeding logically
Let’s say that you are searching through a large resume database for candidates for a technical sales position in your software development company.  To get started you might type in the title of your open position: Technical Account Manager.  This may get you a lot of results, but not many people with experience with your technology. 

You may get resumes for Account Managers in the paper industry that happen to have the word technical somewhere in their information.  Quotation marks come in handy here.  For an exact match, you would search for: “Technical Account Manager”.  But you still need to focus on your technology. 

By default, many search engines (such as Google) treat individual words in an inclusive manner; all words are searched for.  To make sure that this is happening, you can use Boolean logic: “Technical Account Manager” AND firmware.  Now your results will be getting smaller, meaning that you can spend less time sifting through bad matches.  To get even more refined results, you might want to include other technologies that you candidate needs to have and exclude others that are undesirable:  “Technical Account Manager” AND firmware AND drivers AND NOT “user interface” AND NOT HTML. 

Prime results
Your results are looking pretty good, but you still might not be finding all the qualified candidates.  It would be a good idea to include variations on terms: (“Technical Account Manager” OR “technical sales” OR “Sales Engineer”) AND (firmware OR “embedded software”) AND drivers AND NOT “user interface” AND NOT HTML. 

This may seem a bit convoluted at first, but once you start a narrowly focused search, you’ll soon see the advantages of using this technique. 

(Warning: Google does use Boolean logic but with a different format.  OR = OR, but AND NOT = “-“.  Search for Google AND advanced search to learn more.)

By Ivan Larcombe