My Dad was a simple man. For him, life was about figuring out what is right and wrong and then doing the right thing, which he expected of others – and didn’t hesitate to tell them. (Needless to say, I did many things wrong.) But, in his Partial Differential Equations, he was quite intuitive and subtle, often thinking and speaking in metaphors, as Mathematicians do.
I think Dad would have been able to appreciate an intuitive yet common sense approach to searching on the web as superior over “Boolean Builder” tools.
I would advise against Boolean-building tools. They seem attractive, there’s marketing angle to how they sound, and a long-lived tradition of (outdated) long OR searches that recruiters continue to share. Yet these automation tools are all ineffective; I can give you multiple examples using your favorite Builder and your current search. On a given search, they will have missed too many matching results and found too many false positives. Additionally, Boolean ORs are not a good practice on Google (see my latest post about it). A notion that Boolean Builders are for novices or busy, or non-technical people is a myth. It’s best to search “by hand,” and search on Google simply (and repeatedly).
“Boolean building” tools shift your focus to creating a “string” (or even “the string”) while your focus should be getting results, which you achieve by changing the searches all the time to get more and different data. I suppose there are exceptions, where you may need a long OR list of companies or schools to include. You can accomplish it by an Excel “OR” builder, but you would still need to review the list – to have the right coding, include abbreviations, etc. The output would be a string for LinkedIn because Google restricts you to 32 keywords.
Your comments are welcome (especially if you disagree)!
Please join my seven international friends and colleagues and me at the Online Sourcing Learning Day – May 6th! We already have over 100 participants – which we expect to double – from most US states, Canada, Mexico, many Europan countries, Australia, India, and are quite excited about it! If you have a team, please get in touch. I will be speaking on concepts like this one 🙂