Predicate encodings (Wee, TCC 2014; Chen, Gay, Wee, EUROCRYPT 2015), are symmetric primitives that can be used for building predicate encryption schemes. We give an algebraic characterization of the notion of privacy from predicate encodings, and explore several of its consequences. Specifically, we propose more efficient predicate encodings for boolean formulae and arithmetic span programs, and generic optimizations of predicate encodings. We define new constructions to build boolean combination of predicate encodings. We formalize the relationship between predicate encodings and pair encodings (Attrapadung, EUROCRYPT 2014), another primitive that can be transformed generically into predicate encryption schemes, and compare our constructions for boolean combinations of pair encodings with existing similar constructions from pair encodings. Finally, we demonstrate that our results carry to tag-based encodings (Kim, Susilo, Guo, and Au, SCN 2016).