Automatically Detecting Boolean Operations Supported by Search Engines

Each Web search engine provides query language through which it can communicate with its users and retrieve corresponding results to user queries. Supporting Boolean operations is a major characteristic of the query language. In this paper, we propose a novel, fully automatic, query probing based approach to identify what Boolean operations that are supported by a search engines and their corresponding syntaxes. Experiments show high effectiveness and efficiency. Along with this, we also provide a Web application called SE-BOSS (Search Engine Boolean Operation Scanning System) for interested users