Explanation of the boolean search
Turning on the boolean search mechanism allows you to use OR, AND and NOT boolean operators to search the organisations.
- Listing words with no prefix will search using OR (i.e. the word is optional)
- Listing words prefixed with "+" will use AND (i.e. the word must be present in the result)
- Listing words prefixed with "-" will use NOT (i.e. the word must not be present in the result)
Without boolean active, searching for "trust belfast northern NHS" will return results that contain all those words (in boolean terms, the default search uses AND).
With boolean turned on;
- "trust belfast northern NHS" would return results that contain trust OR belfast OR northern OR NHS - this would return a lot of results as every organisation that contains at least one of those words once would be included
- "+trust +belfast +north -NHS" search results must contain trust AND belfast AND north but NOT NHS - this would return a limited set of results that only contained all of those words except "NHS". If the result contained the word "NHS" it would be excluded completely.
Note: you must still seperate the words and their prefix with spaces.
If in doubt you should use the default search (boolean turned off) as you should get the most relevant results. This feature should be used for advanced searches only.
