BOOLEAN AND OTHER SEARCH OPERATIVES:
George Boole was
a 19th Century British mathematician who believed that all values can
be reduced to values of true or false.
We use the
operators AND, OR, NOT to achieve this result.
OR – when we want to find any page with the
two words on it, or any page
with either of the two words – OR expands
our search.
AND – when we want to find only Web pages
that have both the words.
AND narrows the search.
NOT – excludes a word. It
says give me one word but not the other.
HOW IT WORKS:
Type all search keywords in lower
case, and the operators in upper case. There should be a space between the
words and the operators.
The
following shows the different results when the operator is changed:
College OR
University:
To find AT LEAST ONE we search for
both college and university since either of the words might be relevant. OR is
most often used when searching for words that mean the same (such as college OR
university). The more terms we combine with OR, the more records we will
retrieve.
Poverty AND
Crime:
To find BOTH search terms. We will
not receive any records that contain only Poverty or Crime. The results MUST
contain both words. The MORE terms we combine with AND, the fewer
records we receive.
On some search engines, you can also
use NEAR. This is a proximity operator which determines the closeness of the terms
within the document. For example, Poverty w/10 Crime will return documents that
have the word Poverty within 10 words of the word Crime.
Cats NOT Dogs:
We will receive only records in
which ONLY ONE of the terms is present. No records are retrieved where the word
Dogs Appears.
GROUPING
OPERATORS: Enclosing your phrase in quotes. This forces
the search engine to treat the phrase as a single unit.
PROXIMITY
OPERATORS: forces the engines to find the page
where one value is in a particular proximity to the other. “near,” and “adj”
(adjacent)
“near” is
usually within 10 or 20 words – For example: special house committee = 758,000
hits
special house
near committee = 170,000 hits
The “adj”
operator works the same way. “race AJF car” finds pages where race and car are
adjacent to each other.
TRUNCATION: uses * as a wild card.
FILTER:
Filters are special fill-in boxes located on some of the search engine
sites, which allow you to affect the search without using any operatives.
DRILLING
DOWN: The act of
working your way down through a Directory.
CUT AND
PASTE: Go to Word.
Highlight and block a paragraph to copy it into an e-mail or another Word
document. Go to “Edit” on the tool bar, click “Select All”. Move to the
location where you wish to place the copied text. Right-click “Paste”.
CUT AND
COPY A URL: Select
the URL and right-click the mouse – click “Copy” and move to the place to want
to place the URL and click “Paste”.
Highlight
with left mouse, but select with the right button.
Then
go to your document and Paste.
SEARCH
WINDOW: The box in
front of the word “search”
SEARCH
STRING: What you
type in the search box. Can be anything – numbers, letters – the computer sees
a string of characters and looks for that string of characters.
Your search
comes back with a RESULTS PAGE – a Web Page containing the
results of your search (probably several pages)
HITS: The number of responses on the results
page.