BOOLEAN SEARCH ENGINE WEBSITE PLUS

When using a search engine, it is often beneficial to look up other words, other keywords, because you want to find ALL the relevant materials. Ī thesaurus is a book typically used to find synonyms or antonyms for known words. Proximity Searching is not used in our WorldCat catalog, but is available in our EBSCO hosted databases and in ProQuest.

For example, an article about the death penalty, may have sentences that state the “penalty for such a crime is death.” So this sentence would be found by, but would not be found by the phrase search or. By stating NEAR5 or WITHIN5 you want the search terms within 5 words of each other. WITHIN returns results for the words, in the order stated, within some number of words of each other. NEAR returns results for the words, in any order, within some number of words of each other. With Proximity searching you can look for terms that are NEAR each other or are WITHIN so many words of each other. Proximity Searching is something that also can help narrow down your results. Google automatically assumes AND between all search terms. And OR can be replaced by a vertical line.Īnother comment about Boolean operators and search engines is that you should always check the “help” or “tips” on the search page to know if the search automatically inserts AND or OR between your terms. NOT is replaced with the minus sign, because you are subtracting terms from the results.

BOOLEAN SEARCH ENGINE WEBSITE PLUS

AND is replaced with the plus sign, because you are adding a required term. In Google these operators can be replaced by math symbols. So, the search engine will find all occurrences of the term, but then remove those that have the second term, the term listed after NOT. NOT simply removes pages that have that term. AND narrows the results to have BOTH terms present. So, if a website only has one of the terms, it will not be listed in the results page. When AND is placed between both words the search engine is looking for all occurrences where BOTH terms are present in the same page. AND, on the other hand, is used to narrow the results.

In a way it is committing 2 searches, but putting the results in one list. The search engine is looking for either topic. When OR, in all caps, is placed between two word in a query, the engine will look for any occurrence of either word. These words have specific functions in the search process.

Boolean Operators are a set of fixed words, AND, NOT, and OR, that are used in most search engines.

Boolean search engine website