The resulting statements connect terms, remove terms, and organize search terms in ways that result in complex and precise searching. When a search requires multiple Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT, or their symbols), you must use parentheses to group the appropriate terms and quotation marks with each Boolean operator. Using Parentheses with Multiple Operators If you put a space in there, Google will not exclude the word.(When using some search tools, you have to use AND NOT before the word to exclude it.) In Google, to exclude a word use-word with no space between the – and the word you want to exclude. This is commonly done with NOT or the use of the minus (-) sign. For example, if we were looking for information about illegal drug use we would want to exclude prescription drugs from the search results. NOT – If the main idea has a common use you want to exclude, use NOT to exclude that word. For instance, in the previous example of Latino small business growth, we would want to also use the term Hispanic. Most search tools search for all terms (AND) by default, so you need to use the operator OR between terms to let them know you want to find any of the terms not documents with all the terms.
OR – If the main idea has several synonyms, use OR to combine them. That’s what automatically happens in search engines such as Google and Bing unless you tell them to do something different by using OR,NOT, or. To look for information about spiders as signs of climate change, you’ll want to have both terms in the search and perform an AND search.
The Boolean operators AND, OR, and NOT exclude or includeĪND – If the main idea contains two or more ideas, you’ll want to use AND to combine those terms in your search statement. Generally, using these operators narrows your search, making it more precise. You can often do more precise searching by combining search terms by using the words AND, OR, and NOT. Using wildcard characters allows you to find variations of a word. For instance, the wildcard symbol in wom?n finds both woman and women, and the truncating symbol in mathematic* finds mathematics, mathematically, mathematician, etc. Use Wildcard and Truncation Symbols to BroadenĬonsider whether using wild card or truncating symbols would help find variations of a word. Putting a phrase in quotes returns results containing that phrase,Īnd not the results for the individual words. Without those quotation marks, just think how many sources Google or other search tools would waste their/your time on things that have nothing to do with our sniffles. “Common cold” instead of common cold is a good example. Put quotation marks around any phrases among your terms so that the phrase is what’s searched for, rather than the separate words. At this point in your search process, you are moving from merely identifying main concepts and similar search terms to developing more complicated search statements that can do more precise searching.
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