LegalCommunity.org - Boolean Search Tips

LegalCommunity.org uses a boolean search method to accomplish fast database searches. The following operators are supported:

+ A leading plus sign indicates that this word must be present in every result returned.

- A leading minus sign indicates that this word must not be present in any result returned.

(no operator) By default (when neither + nor - is specified) the word is optional, but the results that contain it will be rated higher.

 

> < These two operators are used to change a word's contribution to the relevance value that is assigned to a result. The > operator increases the contribution and the < operator decreases it. See the example below.

 

( ) Parentheses are used to group words into subexpressions. Parenthesized groups can be nested.

 

~ A leading tilde acts as a negation operator, causing the word's contribution to the result relevance to be negative. It's useful for marking noise words. A result that contains such a word will be rated lower than others, but will not be excluded altogether, as it would be with the - operator.

 

* An asterisk is the truncation operator. Unlike the other operators, it should be appended to the word.

 

" A phrase that is enclosed within double quote (`"') characters matches only results that contain the phrase literally, as it was typed.

The following examples demonstrate some searches that use boolean operators:

apple banana

Find results that contain at least one of the two words.

+apple +juice

Find results that contain both words.

+apple macintosh

Find results that contain the word "apple'', but rank results higher if they also contain "macintosh''.

+apple -macintosh

Find results that contain the word "apple'' but not "macintosh''.

+apple +(>turnover <strudel)

Find results that contain the words "apple'' and "turnover'', or "apple'' and "strudel'' (in any order), but rank "apple turnover'' higher than "apple strudel''.

apple*

Find results that contain words such as "apple'', "apples'', "applesauce'', or "applet''.

"some words"

Find results that contain the exact phrase "some words'' (for example, results that contain "some words of wisdom'' but not "some noise words''). Note that the `"' characters that surround the phrase are operator characters that delimit the phrase. They are not the quotes that surround the search word itself.