The Local Internet Archive or LIA now supports Boolean search. Boolean search can help you narrow or widen your search criteria depending on your needs. LIA supports the following Boolean search options:
- NOT
- AND
- OR
These provide the ability to focus a search, particularly when your topic contains multiple search terms.
For example, let imagine we want to extract out search results based upon the state name. One query may look like this:
“MICHIGAN NOT FLORIDA”
This gives all the results that contain the keyword “MICHIGAN” but does not contain the word “FLORIDA”. This is helpful for narrowing the results of a search space.
If we needed to widen our scope and include all results that have either “MICHIGAN” or “FLORIDA” we would use the following query.
“MICHIGAN NOT FLORIDA”
In our last example, we only want to get results that have “MICHIGAN” and “FLORIDA”. We would use the next query.
“MICHIGAN AND FLORIDA”
Using this search phrase will restrict the results to search hits that contain both “MICHIGAN” and “FLORIDA”.
Complex Boolean Searches
It is possible to chain Boolean searches together to expand or narrow the search space even more.
Here is a good example that uses 2 Boolean operators.
“MICHIGAN AND FLORIDA NOT OHIO”
These can be continuously chained to together to narrow or wide the scope of your search.
