How To: Use the "NOT" Boolean Operator
Sometimes, the term you're searching for may be fairly generic, and you may get a long list of search results that may require a lot of additional sorting effort.
Boolean search i.e. searching with AND, NOT, OR & NEAR (all capital) between two search terms can help refine your search.
Use of the "NOT" Boolean operator:
Suppose we want to find murder cases where a knife is not involved. We start by navigating to the regular word search page.
In this example we are trying to search for the term ‘Murder’ in judgments/reports except for documents where the term 'Knife' is mentioned. The search term we use for this purpose is "Murder NOT Knife". It is also a must that in the radio buttons adjoining the search box, the 'Boolean' option must be selected for this to work.
The result screen now displays the documents related to your search with greater accuracy and requires lesser manual sorting.
Boolean search i.e. searching with AND, NOT, OR & NEAR (all capital) between two search terms can help refine your search.
Use of the "NOT" Boolean operator:
Suppose we want to find murder cases where a knife is not involved. We start by navigating to the regular word search page.
In this example we are trying to search for the term ‘Murder’ in judgments/reports except for documents where the term 'Knife' is mentioned. The search term we use for this purpose is "Murder NOT Knife". It is also a must that in the radio buttons adjoining the search box, the 'Boolean' option must be selected for this to work.
The result screen now displays the documents related to your search with greater accuracy and requires lesser manual sorting.
Updated on: 24/10/2018
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