Boolean Search Explained by SpiderMonkey Canadian Search

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Boolean Searches	More Help
Boolean logic refers to the logical relationship among search terms. 'Boolean' is named after the British-born Irish mathematician George Boole who In 1854 published An investigation into the Laws of Thought, upon which are founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities. Boole approached logic in a new way reducing it to a simple algebra, incorporating logic into mathematics. He pointed out the analogy between algebraic symbols and those that represent logical forms. Below are a few options for constructing logical relationships among search terms. Wrap multiple terms in quotes! Probably the most useful expressions will be in searches like this: "Avril Lavigne" or Avril +Lavigne. The operators are the quotations wrapping the two words and the plus sign between the two words. This means you seek results containing both words together, side by side, exactly as you typed them. All search terms are converted to lower case hence SpiderMonkey search is case insensitive.
Boolean Expression	Effect:
+	If you search for "+Canadian Lakes" or "Canadian +Lakes" SpiderMonkey assumes you seek pages containing all words.
-	A leading minus sign indicates that this word must not be present in any page returned. An example would be 'show me records containing "gambling" but not "poker"'. gambling -poker (you can also write this as 'gambling not poker')
< >	These are used to change a word's contribution to the relevance value assigned to a page. The < operator decreases the contribution and the > operator increases it.
( )	Parentheses are put round sub-expressions to give them higher precedence in the search.
~	A leading tilde acts as a negation operator, causing the word's contribution to the page relevance to be negative. A page that contains such a word will be rated lower than others, but will not be excluded altogether, as it would be with the minus operator.
*	A wildcard expression leaves parts of a word optional. Searching for "Mich*" would return matches for 'Mich' first, then 'Michigan, 'Micheal', 'Michael', 'Michealangelo'... etc.
"	Double quotes at the beginning and end of a phrase, matches only records that contain the complete phrase, as it was typed.