| Search Strategy |
Explanation |
Example |
| Boolean Operators |
| AND limits your search, requiring that both or all words appear |
Vietnam AND protest AND students |
| OR is used to capture synonyms or related words |
car OR automobile |
| NOT eliminates possibilities that you suspect will cause problems |
Martin Luther NOT King |
| (Some search engines use + and - for AND and NOT). Several search engines, like Google, assume an AND between words. |
|
|
| Wildcards |
An asterisk (*) or a questionmark (?) may be used to stand for any character or string of characters. |
teen*
(picks up teenage, teenagers, or teens) |
Herz?
(for Herzegovina) |
wom?n
(for woman or women) |
|
| Natural Language Searches |
Some search engines (AskJeeves.com) allow you to type in questions as you would think or speak them. |
Why is the sky blue? |
| Phrases |
You often will want words to appear together in specific order. Commonly, quotation marks ("") set words off as phrases to be searched as a whole. (Some search engines use parentheses, commas, or hyphens instead of quotation marks.) |
| "vitamin A" |
| "bed and breakfast" |
| "George Washington Carver" |
|
| Proximity |
Words often are not meaningful in your search unless they appear near each other in a document. In large documents, words separated by lots of text are generally unrelated. ADJ specifies that two words appear next to each other. NEAR/25 specifies that two words appear within 25 words of each other. |
| global ADJ warming |
| Eric Clapton NEAR/10 Cream |
|
| Field Searching |
This feature restricts searches to certain portions of Web documents. It allows you to specify that the search words appear in the title, URL, or first paragraph. |
|
| Case Sensitivity |
Most search engines are case insensitive by default. However, there are some that recognize uppercase and lowercase variations. |
| Baker (retrieves name and eliminates reference to cake and bread makers) |
| AIDS (eliminates reference to helpers) |
| China (eliminates references to dishes) |
|
