# Query string logic **URL:** \ **Category:** Elasticsearch\ **Created:** [May 26, 2016, 7:13pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/query-string-logic/51091 "2016-05-26T19:13:20Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 3\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Patrick\_Lam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ed8c4c/32.png) [@Patrick\_Lam](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Patrick_Lam)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2016, 7:13pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/query-string-logic/51091/1 "2016-05-26T19:13:20Z")
Hi, I'm having a little trouble understanding a specific Boolean logic from a query string query I'm running. Suppose we have words a, b, and c. I get the following document counts with each query. a: 948 b: 105 a OR b: 971 b AND NOT c: 104 a AND NOT c: 947 a OR (b AND NOT c): 971 a OR b AND NOT c: 104 So I don't understand the last one. Why is it that when I take out the parentheses around (b AND NOT c), it doesn't seem to recognize the a term at all. Put another way, "b AND NOT c" gives me the same result as "a OR b AND NOT c" even though a is by far the most popular term and "a AND NOT c" still gives me 947 docs. I would have expected "a OR b AND NOT c" to be equivalent to "a OR (b AND NOT c)". ---
**Author:** ![Patrick\_Lam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ed8c4c/32.png) [@Patrick\_Lam](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Patrick_Lam)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2016, 7:39pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/query-string-logic/51091/2 "2016-05-26T19:39:03Z")
Never mind. I think I figured it out. The presence of AND is making b a required term without parentheses. ---
**Author:** ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/original/3X/1/a/1ac57faf039f6b580b3f104ef42a2a89e41014de.png) [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)\ **Post date:** [July 5, 2017, 10:48pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/query-string-logic/51091/3 "2017-07-05T22:48:46Z")