November 2 - From Boole...to Google?

Posted on November 2, 2021

This is an update of my post published on November 2, 2010:

Happy Birthday, George Boole!

Born in England on this day in 1815, Boole grew up to become a mathematician. He came up with a kind of algebra we now call Boolean Algebra. The three most common operations of this kind of algebra are still used today in computer science, logic systems, and even in Google searches:

AND

OR and

NOT.

Boole did not create the first computer. However, in hindsight he has been called the founder of computer science. Here's why:

In the 1930s an American named Claude Shannon and a Russian named Victor Shestakov both (separately) realized that Boolean Algebra could be used with electrical switches. Each switch has only two states: On and Off, or True and False, 1 and 0. The AND, OR, and NOT functions can be made into logic gates that serve as the foundation for the digital revolution.

If you search for puppy AND kitten, you will only get pages that include both words.
If you search for puppy OR kitten, you will get pages that either one or both words.
If you search for puppy NOT kitten, you will get pages that include the
word "puppy," but do not include the word "kitten."

So AND and NOT limit and focus your search.
OR widens your search.

Let's see how Boolean logic works. Say there are a lot of foods on a table: a ham sandwich, a green apple, a brownie, a banana, an orange, an Oreo cookie, a yellow cookie decorated with yellow frosting, and a white container full of plain yogurt. Which foods would you get with the following “searches”?

1. fruit AND yellow
2. fruit OR yellow
3. NOT fruit
4. NOT yellow
5. fruit NOT yellow
6. yellow NOT fruit

   

ANSWERS: 

1. banana 

2. apple, banana, orange, yellow cookie 

3. sandwich, brownie, both cookies, yogurt 

4. sandwich, apple, brownie, orange, Oreo, yogurt 

5. apple and orange 

6. yellow cookie

Learn more

• Here is a quickie guide to how Boolean terms can focus or widen a search using a search engine. 

• I tried using the Boolean terms with Google and immediately realized that NOT does not work. Instead, I found out, you type a minus sign immediately before the term you want to exclude. Also, to be recognized as the OR operator, you have to type capital letters OR. 

• Here is an explanation of how to Boolify your web search - and a search engine meant for kids.

Also on this date:

Birthday of President Harding

Birthday of President Polk

Tennis champion and music coach Marion Jones Farquhar 

All Souls' Day

Cookie Monster Day

Trailblazer Daniel Boone's birthday

Anniversary of the invention of cheerleading

Anniversary of North and South Dakota's statehood

Anniversary of an animated Instagram food carving

Pumpkin Destruction Day

Kuratsu Kunchi Festival in Japan

Election Day in the United States

Plan ahead:

Check out my Pinterest boards for:

• November holidays
• November birthdays
• Historical anniversaries in November

And here are my Pinterest boards for:

• December holidays
• December birthdays
• Historical anniversaries in December

September 27, 2011 - Happy Birthday, Google!

A googol is a really, really large number: a one with 100 zeros.

10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

And the inventors of the web-search engine Google wanted a name that would hint that their search engine was connected to a really, really large number of websites. So they took the math term, gave it a small spelling tweak, and Google was born!

Before there was Google...

Yes, there really was life before there was Google. There was even an internet, also known as the World Wide Web, before there was Google. After all, Google is only 13 years old today!

Back in the “olden days,” the early 1990s, there was Archie, a program that downloaded the directory listings of all the files available on the web. If you knew a file name, you could manually search for it in Archie. (The name Archie comes from the word “archive,” which means a collection of documents or records.)

Then there were Veronica and Jughead. (These program names come from characters in “Archie” comic books, so these names were a play on the name of the original web tool.) With Veronica, people could search using a keyword; and with Jughead, people could get menu information.

Wandex was an index of the World Wide Web and probably the first true search engine. It was invented in 1993. At least five more search engines were produced during the following year; but then, in 1995, there was a “BOOM” of search engines offered up to users. (Notice how quickly we moved from “first” to “boom” – just two years!) These included Magellan, Excite, Infoseek, Inktomi, Northern Light, AltaVista, and Yahoo! Yahoo was the most popular and is still used today – but since its launch in 1998, Google took over. These days, Google is used for 91% of all searches, Yahoo! is used for only 4% of all searches, and the third-place search engine, bing (launched just a few years ago), is used for 3% of all searches.

So I guess you could say that Google pretty much dominates the scene!

Why Google? Users can search the internet more easily because the Google algorithm searches entire web pages for keywords (not just the directory or website names), and it displays results arranged from the most-linked-to websites to the least-linked-to sites. This is based on the idea that the best, most useful, most interesting, and most beautiful websites will be linked to most often.

A Name Is a Noun, Except When It's a Verb

Not only has the name “Google” become almost synonymous with the term “search engine,” because of its enormous popularity, but it has become a verb, even. “Why don't you google that?” means, “Why don't you look that up on the internet?” We could say “google it” when we mean look something up on Ask Jeeves or on Ask.com—but we probably say “google it” because we know with 91% certainty that the person is going to look it up on Google!

There have been a few other names of companies that have become nouns that mean a particular item of any brand—for example, we often use “kleenex” to refer to facial tissue of any brand—but there have been few company names that have become both nouns and verbs. Can you think of any?

.

.

.

.

• One is “xerox,” which can mean either “a copy” or “to copy,” even if the copying machine is made by a company other than Xerox. For example:

Please bring a xerox of your birth certificate.

Don't forget to xerox your birth certificate.

• Another is "rollerblades" (the noun, which is often used for in-line skates of any brand) and "rollerblading" (the verb).

• Some people say “hoovering” to mean "to vacuum," after a famous vacuum cleaner manufacturer, Hoover.

November 2, 2010

From Boole...to Google?

Happy Birthday, George Boole

Born in England on this day in 1815, Boole grew up to become a mathematician. He came up with a kind of algebra we now call Boolean Algebra. The three most common operations of this kind of algebra are still used today in logic systems and even in Google searches:

AND

OR and

NOT.

Boole did not create the first computer. However, in hindsight he has been called the founder of computer science. Here's why:

In the 1930s an American named Claude Shannon and a Russian named Victor Shestakov both (separately) realized that Boolean Algebra could be used with electrical switches. Each switch has only two states: On and Off, or True and False, 1 and 0. The AND, OR, and NOT functions can be made into logic gates that serve as the foundation for the digital revolution.

Let's see how Boolean logic works. Say there are a lot of foods on a table: a ham sandwich, a green apple, a brownie, a banana, an orange, an Oreo cookie, a yellow cookie decorated with yellow frosting, and a white container full of plain yogurt. Which foods would you get with the following “searches”?

1. fruit AND yellow
2. fruit OR yellow
3. NOT fruit
4. NOT yellow
5. fruit NOT yellow
6. yellow NOT fruit

ANSWERS: 1.banana 2.apple, banana, and orange 3.sandwich, brownie, both cookies, yogurt 4.sandwich, apple, brownie, orange, Oreo, yogurt 5.apple and orange 6.yellow cookie

Learn more

• Here is a guide to how Boolean terms can focus or widen a search using a search engine. 

• I tried using the Boolean terms with Google and immediately realized that NOT doesn't work. Instead, I found out, you type a minus sign immediately before the term you want to exclude. Also, to be recognized as the OR operator, you have to type capital letters OR. 

• The web search tool Boolify makes it very clear which operator you are using.