Anything more complicated may cause inaccuracies in your search, resulting in many irrelevant items. You won't need it for every search, but when you do, it can save you hours of time and aggravation. If you've been using search engines at all, you're probably already familiar with the concepts underlying the AND and OR operators. The AND operator equals putting a plus sign in front of each subject term. Because they can be combined with each other to create very precise searches.
Search engines read statements from left to right, and consider terms in parentheses as units.
If you think about it, you'll realize that you can't perform the above search using plus signs and spaces. By the way, some of the results of this search surprised me. I never realized the millennium computer bug was that bad. In my next article, I'll discuss the NOT operator , another Boolean basic. More articles are available about search and metasearch engines.