What is Boolean searching?
2 minute read
By Alex Mcauley on
A Boolean search allows users to combine keywords with operators (or modifiers) such as AND, NOT and OR to further produce more relevant results. For example, a Boolean search could be Hotel AND London. This would limit the search results to only those documents containing both keywords. Another example might be Theresa NOT May which would return results where the content contains the word Theresa but not the word May. Please note that all searches in the Nodex Recruitment CRM are case insensitive meaning it doens't matter if you serach in lowercase, uppercase or a mixed case - the input is always treated the same.
Here are some of the logical operators available for use in your FabricCRM:
OR/,example: these are equivalent operatorsSteve OR Johnis the same asSteve, JohnANDexample:Steve AND John- return all records withSteveandJohnin their content.+example:John +Smith- this requires the wordSmithto appear in the record to be considered a match-(hyphen) example:John -Smith- the inverse of above, this operator states that matches should be considered ifSmithdoes NOT appear in the record.~(tilde) example:Alam~1will search for records that allow 1 substituion to be classed as a match for example Alan would be considered a match in this case
Mixing operators
You can build very powerful and expressive searches by mixing operators. For example you can perform a search such as John -Smith OR Jack Jones. This will tell the system to match any record that contains John but does not contain Smith or anything that contains Jack Jones
Fuzziness or spelling substitutions
Your CRM also allows you to add a fuzziness operator ~ followed by a number which is the maximum number of substitutions allowed to be considered a match. What this means in simple speak is you can search for spelling mistakes and the algorithm will return records based up to the maxium number of times it needs to change or substitute a letter inside the word to consider a match. A fuzziness of 1 expressed as nodxe~1 would return any record containing nodex because swapping x and e requires one operation or substitution. The higher the number the wider the search will carry and the more results it will return. Please note that spelling only works when using a broad match.
Our recruitment CRM software aims to be extremely intuitive when it comes to searching and filtering your results. You will find many filtering options including record counts on the left side of your search results as well as powerful sorting options to slice and dice your data the way suits you best.