Monday 25 August 2008

Yahoo search drops Boolean

Online magazine reports that Yahoo! search has dropped support for full Boolean queries. The NOT and AND operators are gone; the OR operator still works. Since AND is the default, it is not always needed. The NOT operator can be replaced with the minus sign before a term, but nesting with parentheses fails, especially for a search like (term1 AND term2) OR (term3 AND term4). Google still accepts the most popular Boolean terms, and Exalead even supports the NEAR operator. Live Search is now the only major search engine with full Boolean support.

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