They have an IQ of zero, lack any sense of intuition and possess no magical properties. They simply retrieve sequences of characters. When told to search for a word or phrase, a computer retrieves all documents that contain that exact sequence of characters. Thus, computer retrieval is an extremely explicit process. The challenge is to translate concepts into a set of search terms that will retrieve documents on the desired topic.
Boolean logic is the means by which computers combine terms to perform complex operations.
Boolean Logic A very simple search entails entering one term into the computer and finding all documents that contain that word. Most research inquiries are more complex than that as the topic typically involves several intersecting concepts. Boolean logic is used to link search terms together to form complex search statements for computer retrieval. Boolean Logic tutorial Boolean logic is a powerful search tool that permits very complex searches by combining the logical operators and using parentheses. This statement will retrieve any document that contains the word divorce AND either the word children or the word adolescents .