Meta application icon Combining Searches

With Meta, you can combine one or more search conditions to create more specific searches. This is the basic feature that allows you to create meaningful, useful searches that really start to help you find what you're looking for.

For example, if you want to find documents on your computer in which you wrote about your pets, you might use a search that looks for documents containing the word "dog" or the word "cat", like this:

dog or cat

This query would tell Meta to show you all the documents on your computer that contain the word "dog", plus all the documents that contain the word "cat". So both words don't have to show up in the same document, but at least one of them does.

What if you want to find documents that specifically deal with both of your pets? Then you might look for documents that contain both words, like this:

dog and cat

This search will tell Meta to show you only documents that contain both words. Documents that contain only one of the two words will not be shown to you.

Learning More: Keeping Search Conditions Separate With Parenthesis

Using parenthesis, you can combine any number of search conditions. Parenthesis keep search conditions separate from each other.

For example, if you wanted to search only for documents that talk about your white dog or documents that talk about your orange cat, you could use a search like the following:

(white and dog) or (orange and cat)

This is called Boolean search logic, and makes possible some very useful and interesting searches.

Learning More: Meta Assumes and

If you don't use a Boolean operator such as and or or to combine multiple search conditions, Meta will assume that you meant to combine them using the and operator.

For example, the previous search regarding your white dog or your orange cat could be re-written as follows with the exact same meaning:

(white dog) or (orange cat)