Tip: Always check the search tool's help section before
you do a search
Boolean Operators
- and indicates that only those Web pages that have both words
in them will be retrieved
- or will result in Web pages that have either term
- not is used when a term needs to be excluded (in some search
engines, type and not)
- When ands and ors are used in one search statement, you must put parentheses
around the items that are to be performed separately, for example, (doctors
or physicians) and ethics. This is called nested Boolean logic.
Implied Boolean Operators
- Shortcuts to and and not. If search engine supports this
feature, type "+" in front of a word that must appear, and "-" before
a word that must not appear.
Phrase Searching
- A string of words that must appear next to each other. Global warming
and chronic fatigue syndrome are phrases. Most search engines
require double quotation marks to differentiate a phrase from words searched
separately. The two phrases mentioned above would be expressed like this:
"global warming" and "chronic fatigue syndrome."
Truncation
- Retrieval of a root word and its different endings, for example, postmodern*
would retrieve postmodernist, postmodernism, and so forth.
Proximity Searching
- A search feature that makes it possible to search for words that are
near each other in a document. Proximity operators are usually words such
as near or within or w.. For example, in a database
that supports proximity searching, you may enter "global warming" near
"greenhouse effect" or "global warming" w/5 "greenhouse effect."
Field Searching
- The capability of limiting search results to parts of a Web page, for
example, URLs, headings, summaries, images, and so forth.
Case Sensitivity
- Some search engines recognize capitalization in words and some don't.
This can be very important when looking for proper names, like Sting,
or The Who.
Limiting by Date
- Some search engines allow you to search the Web for pages that were
entered between certain dates.
Output Features
Relevancy Ranking
- Most search engines list the results of your search with the most relevant
first and the least relevant last. Each search engine has its own algorithm
for determining relevance, but it usually involves counting how many times
the words in your query appear in the Web pages. Some search engines,
for example, Google, http://www.google.com, primarily ranks results by
determining how many Web pages have links to a particular page, in other
words, it uses a "link popularity" algorithm.
Annotations or Summaries
- Some search engines include short descriptive paragraphs of each Web
page that is returned to you.
Results Per Page
- Some search engines allow you to choose how many results you want listed
per page.
Sorting Results
- Some services allow you to choose how you want your results sorted:
by relevance, URL, arranged in folders, and so forth.
Developed by Karen Hartman
