

Place NOT before a word to exclude the word from results. Including OR in queries is especially useful in social media, given the preponderance of abbreviations and misspellings. You can use OR to search for nicknames, abbreviations and common misspellings of your company and its products, as in Wal-Mart OR Wallmart OR Wally Mart.

If placed between several words or phrases, results will display pages with one, several or all of the words. OR will produce results containing any of the words connected by OR. If you input Dove AND chocolate, you’ll receive results that contain both words, leading with Dove Chocolate. Boolean search narrows results to your desired outcome. If you enter a search for Dove, you’ll see results for the bird, the soap, personal hygiene products, and a nonprofit foundation, among other unrelated results. Write AND between search terms to require the search results to include both words in any order. In the Google search engines, the connecting words must be in all caps.ĪND.

Simply put, Boolean search involves words like AND, OR, NOT and punctuation like parenthesis and quotes. Mainstream search engines like Google and Bing as well as social media monitoring service such as, previously CyberAlert, permit Boolean searches.įor many media searches conducted by PR and marketing, using Boolean queries is the solution to the problem of too many extraneous or inappropriate clips. The art of constructing Boolean search queries is actually quite easy to learn and master. Some PR and marketing folks may cringe when they hear they should use “Boolean,” thinking it’s some sort of geeky computer solution that’s beyond their skills. It’s especially useful in eliminating extraneous results. The use of Boolean search queries can assure more accurate media monitoring results. Even worse, they may be inundated with irrelevant mentions about companies or brands with similar names in different industries. But many companies miss mentions because they aren’t using the best search strategies. Public relations and marketing teams may subscribe to a media monitoring service to find mentions of their brands in news and social media. Boolean searches will improve your media monitoring and social media monitoring results.
