Sunday, January 7, 2007

Search Strategies for the Web and Databases - Part IV

A Brief Introduction to Boolean Search Strategies

The following tips should help improve your search capabilities several-fold, and you can use them on almost all Web and database search engines (e.g. databases available through academic and public libraries such as Proquest and ABI/Inform etc. - typically you can gain access to some of these types of resources from your home PC through a simple Internet connection) - the good news, however, is that if an engine doesn't support these options - it'll just ignore them.

1) Use quotes to specify terms - if you want to search for material about online marketing, for example, search for
"online marketing" (with the quotes)
rather than just -
online marketing (note - without the quotes).

The quotes will guarantee that the engine only returns pages where "online marketing" appears as a phrase, rather than returning every page on the Web or in the database where both "online" and "marketing" happen to appear.

2) Use "And" to further focus your search - for example, say you were only interested in "online marketing" of books - your search should look as follows -

"online marketing" and books

This kind of search will only return sites that include the term "online marketing" and also the word "books"

3) Use "Or" if you're trying to limit a search, as above, but would like to try a few different options - for example, perhaps you're searching for material on wine but don't care if it's red or white - try searching on the following combination -

"white wine" or "red wine"

This type of a search will return any page where either "white wine" or "red wine" can be found

4) Use parentheses to organize and combine searches. Let's return to the "online marketing" searches - say you're interested in online marketing of various types of media. Media can include books, CDs, videos and DVDs (among many other formats). You could structure a search as follows -

"online marketing" and (books or CDs or videos or DVDs)

The parentheses help ensure that your search is executed in the order you would like it to be - just like one would use parentheses in a mathematical calculation if you wanted to ensure that addition is completed prior to multiplication etc.

5) Use a negative sign "-" to exclude sites that include specific words or phrases - suppose for the above search you notice that most of the results in the first few pages are coming from McGraw Hill's site, but you want to get to results from other sites - run the search again, as follows -

"online marketing" and (books or CDs or videos or DVDs) -www.mcgrawhill.com

...and - voila - you should only receive search results that exclude pages from McGraw Hill's site.

In summary...

Search strategies can get a lot more intricate and complicated than the little that we've covered here. But - you've got to start somewhere. Typically successful searches will require some degree of iteration. Stay tuned to this space for more elaborate advice about successful search in the near future - and please don't hesitate to ask for clarifications, and to offer your own hints and tips, by responding to this post.

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