PetPeeve: Crappy nonBoolean search engines

Alta Vista is insufficient unto itself as a search engine; there are zillions of sites that have never been indexed by Alta Vista, and many of those have been indexed or registered by other search engines instead.

So when I’m looking for something that Alta Vista doesn’t find for me, I try something else, perhaps one of those composite megasearch sites like Dogpile or google or Huskysearch, or perhaps the MacOS “Search the Internet” option in Sherlock –

More often than not, I’m looking for something that requires Boolean operators to express it, e.g. –

“Yes” and “And You and I” and “mp3”

or "
– and most of these power-searcher sites (and Sherlock) don’t do Boolean! I get 698,412 hits for sites that contain the word “yes” or “and” or “I” or “mp3”, highly useful thank you very much!

Why the bloody hell don’t all search engines that dare to think they are rendering a useful service support some variation on Boolean operators!??


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  1. Although you are correct that Google doesn’t support Boolean, it is a regular search engine, not a meta engine.

  2. Altavista does support Boolean searches–see their help for more information. Another good search engine is www.alltheweb.com, which in its advanced search even has a form for submitting Boolean requests,

Stupid comma–make that www.alltheweb.com