search terms: boolean and exact phrase

Question

search terms: boolean and exact phrase

I constructed my search terms per the "tips" to find messages containing the exact phrase "save as" and the word corrupt:

"save as" AND corrupt

the search returned a list of messages with the word "corrupt" highlighted as I would have hoped, but it also listed messages with "as" highlighted and even more bizarre, with the word "and" highlighted.

Did I miss something in the discussion of boolean expressions? Do I have to do something special to cause it to treat "and" as an operator instead of as a search string????

and why is it highlighting "as"???

G4 dual 1GHz, Mac OS X (10.4.6)

Posted on May 10, 2006 6:08 PM

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Answer 1

Tuttle

Level 7

29,541 points

May 10, 2006 6:50 PM in response to John F. Williams

I tried entering your search terms like this:

save && as && corrupt

and I received these results.

Not too bad....

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Answer 2

May 10, 2006 8:13 PM in response to Tuttle

Groovy, but I'm not seeing how that answered any of my questions. Nor does it illustrate that the exact phrase operation is working.

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Answer 3

Tuttle

Level 7

29,541 points

May 10, 2006 9:06 PM in response to John F. Williams

I'm not seeing how that answered any of my questions.

I think my answer goes to this question:

Do I have to do something special to cause it to treat "and" as an operator instead of as a search string????

To:

Nor does it illustrate that the exact phrase operation is working.

You are correct. All it does is help you to get better results than you got using AND.

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Answer 4

May 11, 2006 8:17 AM in response to Tuttle

Thanks for pointing out that && seems to work. But the point of my question is not to get better results for my example search, but to try to understand the correlation between "Search Tips" and real life, so I can do better searches in the future.

To rephrase my question: did I misread what AND and quote marks are supposed to do, or are they broken? If they are broken, will they be fixed?

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Answer 5

Tuttle

Level 7

29,541 points

May 11, 2006 8:42 AM in response to John F. Williams

Perhaps (Host) Brian Z can help to explain why AND and other operators are not working as they should....

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