Thank you. Now, assuming that book is indeed Last Bus to Woodstock, it’s the first result from the search that Mr2001 suggested.
Seems Google isn’t as ungainly as you think.
It’s not Last Bus to Woodstock. It’s Last Seen Hitchhiking.
Yeah, but how do you nest your terms? What differentiates this:
“last” and (“title” or “book” or “paperback”)
from this:
(“last” and “title”) or (“book” or “paperback”) – ??
I understand I could enter:
last title OR book OR paperback
– but how does Google know that the pages returned must each contain the word “last”, in addition to which it must contain either the word “title”, or “book” or “paperback”? Or, in the second example, that each page returned must contain either the word “last” or the word “title”, in addition to which it must contain either the word “book” or the word “paperback”?
I’m not saying it can’t, I’m just saying I don’t understand the protocol for nesting the terms hierarchically.
Ah. Then page 2 of that search.
You don’t. Google doesn’t let you group terms, so this Google search:
foo bar OR baz bleck
… is always equivalent to this AltaVista search:
foo AND (bar OR baz) AND bleck
AFAIK there’s no way to do this AltaVista search on Google:
(foo AND bar) OR (baz AND bleck)
Well, it looks like Google can do somewhat more complex searches than I was aware of, although still more limited than Alta Vista’s boolean search field. And the syntax of boolean is just easier for me to bang out, it’s just like fourth grade math. It’s closer to how I think.
(“easier to use” and “more powerful search specifications”) and not (“larger total index”)
is IMHO >
“more total hits” -“specificity” OR “good syntax”
[or would that be “more total hits” -“specificity” OR -“good syntax”?]
For years, I did…because I like doing boolean searches, and google just couldn’t do it. (As has been mentioned above.)
But they changed a few years ago, to make themselves more like google (or something) and harder to do booleans on. Maybe they’ve changed back, but there was a while when it wasn’t handling nested ands, ors, and nots. All of a sudden, I was getting crap. So I stopped going there.
After this thread, maybe I’ll start again - it was always much nicer to weed out the irrelevant sites…