I was talking with Marcy Phelps about Dialog searching (yes, we're geeks, OK?) and she reminded me that no one remembers the TARGET command. That probably includes you, too, unless you actually RTFM, which is available in all its 277 pages of glory here. It's actually a pretty cool command for those times when you want what I call "squishy Boolean" - that is, when you want to search for articles that include most of the search terms specified.
For example, if I wanted to find articles that looked at the personal care market, I might want to find articles that mention the main players. I could AND all the names together, but that would require that all the names appear in each article. All I really want are articles that mention several of the players. At any command prompt, I could type:
target gillette avon revlon
This would retrieve up to 50 articles that have either all or most of the search terms, ranked by relevance.
You can also specific words that must appear in every article; you can include phrases; you can even include nested logic. TARGET automatically executes a CURRENT command in the background but, as I just blogged, that's not working for at least one file.
You can read more about TARGET here.
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