Higgledy Piggledy

[Wildcard]

Jill,
Boolean Logic

You don't have to understand Boolean algebra to get what a Boolean search is. Basically think of it as yes/no logic. For example if I I enter the words 'cat AND hat' into Google, this would indicate that I would like to search for pages that contained both words. If I entered 'cat OR hat', the search would include pages that contained either word.

It's basically a way resolving mathematical statements into a true/false value. Like:

1 AND 1 = True
1 AND 0 = False
0 AND 1 = False
1 OR 1 = True
1 OR 0 = True
0 OR 1 = True

So if we replace the 0 and 1 with our terms, you can see how Google would treat the search:

'cat'(exists on this page) AND 'hat'(exists on the page being searched) = True(show this page in the results)
'cat'(doesn't exist on the page) AND 'hat'(does) = False(do not include this page in the search results)
'cat'(does exist) OR 'hat'(doesn't exist) - True(show this page in the results)
'cat'(doesn't) OR 'hat'(doesn't) = False(don't include this page in the search results)

Does that make it any clearer?