What is X-ray and boolean search?
Boolean search is search through data bases using logical operators of some search engine (e.g. Google, duckduckgo, bing) designed to weed out irrelevant results for a query. X-ray is a boolean query (in a search engine) on a particular website.
Now in simple words. 😊 There is a simple google query - a set of words. For example, "Holborn metro station cafe".
If you add a logical operator to it, such as "OR", a simple query becomes a boolean search: "cafe OR restaurant Holborn".
Then the search engine will understand this query as "I have to find a cafe or restaurant in Holborn."
And if you add to it the name of the site where the search engine should search for this information, you get X-ray: "site:facebook.com cafe" or "site:facebook.com cafe OR restaurant Holborn".
Then the search engine will understand this query as "I have to go to the facebook website and find a cafe or restaurant in Holborn.”
More about operators
Operator site: - search for a specific site (x-ray), for example: site:linkedin.com/in
AND (always in capital letters) - to find all keywords, e.g.: python AND java
Nowadays this operator is hardly used, because it is implied by default, i.e. "python AND java" and "python java" are the same queries.
OR (also in capital letters) - to find at least one (or more) of the keywords, for example: python OR java developer - Such a query will return results that have the word developer AND either python or java or both.
NOT - excludes a keyword from the results, for example: site:linkedin.com/in python NOT recruiter
intext: - the word is in the text of the page (anywhere in the text)
intitle: - the word is in the title of the page (definitely is in the title, and maybe somewhere else), for example, site:linkedin.com/in intitle:java
" " - join the query into one phrase, for example, site:linkedin.com/in intitle: "Java developer". This way you won’t find pages with words java and developer separately, but you’ll find this phrase on pages. By the way, words that have special symbols are better written in quotation marks. For example, "c++", "c#".
AROUND/NEAR - Search for pages with the keywords near each other site:linkedin.com/in React NEAR developer
~ - results will contain this word or its synonyms, e.g. ~fintech will return results with bank/trading/finance etc.
( ) - grouping queries: (React OR Angular) (Web OR frontend)
"English - language, e.g. site:linkedin.com/in PHP "English
"email" - only pages where mail is specified.
More operators and Х-ray search examples in the next articles
