able to link concepts/keywords together. Search engines use Boolean operators to do this, while some of them offer menus to create a query.
Despite its intimidating
name, Boolean search techniques are really quite simple to learn and can add tremendous efficiency to your searching. Boolean Operators Although the list of operators includes others as does the syntax available to Boolean searching we will only cover the three primary ones. The AND Operator AND — Finds pages that contain all search terms OR List pages which have the keyword terms on both sides of this operator must be present somewhere in the document in order to be scored as a result. The OR Operator OR — Finds pages that contain the keyword terms on either side of the operator. In other words – pages which have the one of the terms on EITHER side of this operator are sufficient to be scored as a result.
It can also be described as a Match Any search. You
use the command like this:
Oracle OR Sybase The NOT Operator NOT — documents containing the term AFTER this operator are rejected from the results set.
Depending on the search engine you could also
use AND NOT or BUT NOT as well. Proximity Some search engines let you indicate how close words should appear to each other. We will review the use of NEAR, ADJ, W/n. NEAR NEAR — This operator is similar to the AND operator, only both terms don’t have to be next to each other.
Most search engines will have an assumed distance, for
example when you enter the query (Database NEAR design), Altavista.com would interpret that as the command to return any results anytime “design” occurs within 10 words of “database”. Also some search engines allow you to define how far apart they can be.
For example Lycos will allow you to use the following
query (Database Near/5 design). WITHIN ~~ Within is expressed as W/n where n is any number. W/n is a proximity operator that gives us the power to manually set how close we want things to be.
For example: optical W/5 engineer
finds documents in which optical occurs within five words after (to the right of) engineer - as in optical systems engineer, optical board level design engineer, optical long-haul systems engineer, etc. ADJ ADJ means directly adjacent. It finds documents that contain specific keywords directly in front of or behind a primary keyword.
For example: (engineer or developer or
architect) ADJ software Proximity Logic Relies on AND logic Both words are in the document and within a certain number of words of each other (number will vary with search engine used) Some search engines will let you specify the number of words between Not all search engines support proximity logic BEFORE
(Exalead) BEFORE: Finds pages reporting
a modification before the specified date in dd/mm/yyyy format. before:25/12/2003 (Altavista) < The before operation specifies the order of terms, in that term1 must occur before term2. AFTER
(Exalead) AFTER: Finds pages reporting a
modification after the specified date in dd/mm/yyyy format. after:25/12/2003
(Altavista) > The after operation specifies
the order of terms, in that term1 must occur after term2. Boolean Logic Use Boolean operators to expand or narrow your search Different search engines use varying symbols for the Boolean operators A few search engines do not allow Boolean searches Meta-search engines may not handle Boolean searches very well