Default OR AND Other Booleans
Scott Johnson points out in Fuzzyblog that he was having issues with a PubSub subscription until he realized that we use a default OR as part of our query syntax. His search for Feedster johnson (which, BTW, comes close in wordage a Hootie and the Blowfish album and song, Fairweather Johnson, but I digress) would bring back any matches for the word Feedster or any matches for Johnson, which is not desirable (unless you are performing some really odd research, and we don’t judge!).
Thus, I’m sure that he has since changed his search syntax to Feedster AND Johnson, which will probably bring back more relevant results. The term Feedster is narrow enough that he probably doesn’t have to add any other type of search criteria, but let me indulge our readership.
If someone decided to only link to the Feedster site and not actually write the name Feedster, the subscription query above would not match the results. PubSub has a uri: attribute that fixes this. So, we’ll add to Scott’s query string.
(Feedster OR uri:feedster.com) AND johnson
This also might not be as useful as it could be as some may also link to Scott’s blog and not write the word Johnson. Thus, we’ll add to the string:
(Feedster OR uri:feedster.com) AND (johnson OR uri:fuzzyblog.com)
This also helps if someone spells Feedster or Johnson incorrectly, that, while not likely, has happened (My subscription query for all matches to PubSub includes the term Pubusb.
Last, it is also possible that the word Johnson will be mentioned with Feedster but have nothing to do with Scott himself. A quick fix would be to use our /within operator syntax. Thus the following can be added:
(Feedster OR uri:feedster.com) AND (”scott /within 2 johnson” OR uri:fuzzyblog.com)
So, what was once a simple query (which will probably work well) became something else. I may be going a bit overboard with many of my “ifs” above, but we have to remember that when writers are posting to blogs, they are not looking for ways in which blog searchers will find their posts, but are writing for themselves. It’s up to the searcher to use as much boolean logic to grab as much relevant data as possible.
On that note, we wish Scott well on his new venture.
Steven M. Cohen
scohen [at] pubsub [dot] com