About Boolify:

Boolify is a great tool to teach children (and adults too!) how to properly use a search engine. Finding content using search is a very important skill to learn. One often finds millions of search results after entering a keyword. In order to quickly find the needed content, you should refine the search. Command line searches use the concept of boolean operators to achieve this goal. In simple terms, this means learning to use AND, OR, NOT in a search to refine the results. By combining them together, one can narrow down a search to give exactly what is needed.

While those with experience may find the boolean concept intuitive, it is often a challenge for people that are beginning to learn how to use a search engine. The concept can seem very abstract and things get even more complicated if you try to use mathematics to explain it. One of the best ways of teaching and learning boolean search is with Boolify. Just drag a green square and drop it into the main window. After that, type a search term in the box that was placed and press the enter key. Results will instantly appear below. The search results are in SafeSearch STRICT mode, which means any inappropriate adult content will be automatically filtered in the results returned by us. In addition, our own keyword filter overlay will block certain words for added safety.

The fun part comes next - adding refinement blocks, like AND, OR, NOT to narrow things down. Observing what happens when you add or remove different operators helps one learn in an interactive exciting manner. For example, you might start out searching for "apple," but maybe you only want to learn about fruits and not the famous computer company. Adding the NOT operator (drag/drop) with 'apple.com' as the keyword will start to make the results more focused on fruits.

After each operator block is added or removed, the actual command line shortcut search is also shown right above the search results. This is a great way to learn these powerful commands when a real search is done that does not have a boolify interface, such as on the regular KidzSearch.com SafeSearch homepage, Google, Yahoo, etc. With practice using Boolify, you will quickly become a search expert, including the use of advanced operators, such as site or title searches. Site searches limit the results to a specific website domain (e.g., *.edu for all education sites, or yahoo.com just to search Yahoo). Title matches (intitle) require the results to be in the page title, which often, but not always gives a closer match. url matches (inurl) only show results where some part of the page link has the term in it. These more advanced concepts are best learned by trying them out using the Boolify tool. Lastly, doing a Filetype search will only return matches of that type of content, such as (doc, xls, pdf, jpg, gif,...) Please contact us if you have any questions or comments.

Now go Boolify!

Boolify Boolean Graphical Search Learning Tool