By jove, I think it DOES work!

Try these:

Haines and Vilnius - 12 hits
Haines and Riga - 11 hits
Haines and (Vilnius or Riga) - 16 hits!

Good job, Danny and crew!

Calling Dr. Bickers. One of your pediatric patients just died of old age in the waiting room.

THANK YOU!

Yes, Rex, you are crazy. (Well, predicted someone might say this, so don't complain.)
Rex, I think you've really got to get a life away from this board!

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Thanks Rex for pointing this out. These forums have so much 1st hand info in their archives, even compared to google.com. But it's often *so* hard too pull them up in a "text search".
Regards, Walter

Can someone explain this?

Rex, it has worked before, or at least within the last couple of months, because I've been using the function.

To explain: (Don't ask me what "Boolean" refers to -- thought it had to do with Oxbridge life) You can ask the "search" feature here to search for something with "Boolean" connectors and it will narrow the search for you to threads that have both (or either) of the words you want.

Example:

If you search on "Cambridge," you'll get the first 50 of all the threads that have the word "Cambridge" in them.

But if you search on "Cambridge" AND "hotel" you'll get all the threads that have BOTH those two terms in them, which may mean you will hit a lot about hotels in Cambridge, although you may get some with "Cambridge" in one post and "hotel" in another, all within the same thread.

If you search on "Cambridge" and "hotel or restaurant," you'll get all the threads either with "Cambridge" and "hotel" or with "Cambridge" and "restaurant" included.

See Rex's example with Haines/Vinius/Riga above.

It occurs to me that what neither I nor Rex made clear is that you must use the actual word "and" or the actual word "or" in your search, to tell the program whether you want BOTH terms or EITHER term. And you can string together more than 2 terms if you use the "and" or the "or" with them.

Again, see Rex's example.

Thank Rex, thats useful to know

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Rex,

I have played with this from time to time -- glad it now does work. Thanks for advising.

John H.

You're welcome, Walter and John H.

You're welcome, also.

The pedant in me was thinking to poast this tribute http://www.nifl.gov/susanc/boole1.htm - - to George Boole, thinking what a pity it is that so few people know who he was - - and when I reviewed it, it occurred to me - - gosh, I wonder if they have interested NOT!?

And sure enough they have!

Now for the first time ever, here's a way to search for "York" (England) for example, without getting all the threads that reference NEW York - -

"York NOT new"

It actually works!

Pretty cool. I bet there are a lot of other examples of how this might be useful.

Forum - Europe
Text - castle not neuschwanstein
Topic(s) - Germany

An interesting list of threads

Very interesting, Rex and PCM. It never would have occurred to me to try Boolean logic here. I tried chateau NOT Loire and Loire still appeared in headings and messages.??

Incomprehensible, sue. It almost seems that this ONE thread is VERY vexed:

Trip report: two weeks in Paris, Loire, Dordogne, Provence (Warning: nowhere near as amusing as Nevil's!)

It IS retrieved by "loire NOT chateau"

It IS retrieved by "chateau NOT loire"

It IS NOT retrieved by "chateau AND loire"!! though it clearly contains both words. the only thing I can figure is that it cotains "concatenated forms" of both words - - i.e. "Loire," (with the comma) and "chateau-hotel".

I still can't figure out how that would result in the output shown above.

But there has to be an explanation. Computers don't REALLY "make mistakes". They blindly follow rules programmed into them. If this is the only weirdness we can find, it's pretty minuscule.

to the top

topping, for LV Sue...

Hi, Rex. I saw your message and was also perplexed about the strange Loire/chateau combos, but too lazy to pursue it. It was very hard to come up with a NOT situation, actually. If I could just think of a hotel name that was a town, I could do NOT hotel. Maybe that would work better. I've had great success with the AND function, though. Very useful.

Sue,

Do you have a bookmark of - - or the URL to - - the thread about how to type €, the euro symbol?

Rex...

try this link:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/technet/itsolutions/techsol/euro/ofc.asp

This works also to type the Euro:
(in Microsoft Word)


The following keyboard shortcut works for all keyboard layouts:

Type 20ac, and then press ALT+X.

Word automatically displays the euro in the correct font.

chris

What works in Word does not work here.

There are a series of HTML-like codes that have been discovered, but I have forgotten their source, and can no longer find the thread.

Here are a few that I remember:

&= &

this one is crucial for the pseudo-typing of all that follows below.

€ = €
♦ = ♦

I am not sure if I remember "the other three suits" correctly or not.

&spade; ? ♠ ?
&club; ? ♣ ?
&heart; ? ♥ ?

I wish I remember the source for these - - it had "wired" in it or something like that.