Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) are very powerful for refining your search results. While CityFALCON attempts to make results as relevant as possible and we offer lots of features like Similar Story Grouping, Source Selection, and several filters, you might still need to be more specific. This is common for especially popular topics.
So here is a cheat sheet to better understand Boolean (advanced) search.
The main operators AND, OR, and NOT.
X AND Y: only display results that contain both X and Y; if they're not both present, the result is not displayed
X OR Y: display results that contain X, Y, or both
X AND NOT Y: display results about X only. If Y is present, the result is not shown
Additional operators: parentheses and quotes
In the future, CityFALCON will also support quotes and parentheses. The former require the result to have your exact wording and spelling, while the latter indicate groups.
(X AND Y) OR Z: displays articles that have only Z, only X+Y, or both (X+Y+Z). Importantly, this does not return results that have only X or only Y by themselves. They must both be present.
For example, you might search (Oil AND Gold) OR Elections. You will get results for elections, results that talk about both oil and gold, and results that talk about all three. However, you will not get results about only oil, about only gold, about oil and elections, or about gold and elections. The group of oil and gold must be together and neither oil nor gold can be alone.
Using parentheses is practical not just for readability, but unexpected results may occur if you have a complex query with many operators and don't group parts together.
Two more examples of parenthetical complex search:
"entries via airport": this will only return results that have this exact phrase. Since exact phrasing can be rare, if there are no exact matches, we'll give you some results that are close. Using quotes is a common tactic when a similar but incorrect phrase crowds your results.