Search Engine Reviews: Alta Vista and Four11 + Boolean Basics: The NOT (or AND NOT) Operator
© Paula Dragutsky
The NOT (or AND NOT) operator is supported by Alta Vista (go to Advanced Search), Lycos (go to Advanced Search, choosing any of the words or all the words from the menu), HotBot (use the main search box, choosing the Boolean phrase from the menu), and Excite (use the main search box).
The NOT (or AND NOT) operator is exactly comparable to the minus sign in "simple" search syntax. It tells the search engine to exclude any item containing the word or phrase that appears after NOT or AND NOT. For example: squash NOT vegetable
or
squash AND NOT vegetable
mean exactly the same as
+squash -vegetable
When you're using the NOT (or AND NOT) operator, you must leave a space before and after NOT or AND NOT. It's safest to capitalize NOT or AND NOT (although this isn't required in all search engines).
Common uses for the NOT (or AND NOT) operator are to differentiate between two words that are spelled the same, but have different meanings, and to distinguish between people with the same name.
When you combine Boolean operators, you can make your searches much more specific. For example, in Lycos: (HotBot doesn't support the NEAR operator.)
jaguar NEAR zoo NOT car
or, in Excite and Alta Vista:
jaguar NEAR zoo AND NOT car
Sometimes, you'll want to exclude additional words based on your search results. Some of the items resulting from the above search contained information about Jaguar software, produced by Atari. Therefore, you could improve this search as follows:
jaguar NEAR zoo NOT car NOT Atari
or
jaguar NEAR zoo AND NOT car AND NOT Atari
There's information about practically every subject on the Web. The next time you're having trouble finding material about your topic, try using Boolean operators to focus your search.
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