June 15, 2008

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Google Query Question

I have a Google query question: I know how to use the Boolean terms like AND, OR, NOT, etc. to exclude some false positives, include multiple possible matches, etc. But what I'd really like is a "Not Just" option. For example, if I'm looking for resumes (about 20% of my day job), and I want to find someone who went to Columbia, I know that I'll have to search for "Columbia" because most people don't bother to call it "Columbia University". And I also know that I'll get lots of people who a) live in Columbia, SC, or b) were admitted to the bar in the District of Columbia. Unfortunately, a) excludes people who went to Columbia and then moved, and even worse, b) excludes people who may have gone to one of the top law schools in the country and then practiced law in the capital, and who are thus probably very good candidates, indeed.

So I'm looking for a way to either tell Google or a job-search engine to ignore bad search strings containing good ones, but not to exclude them. I imagine it's Computer Science 101 to construct an ignore-but-don't-exclude out of normal Boolean operators, or perhaps Computer Science 401 to prove that this is impossible.

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