Searching Fundamentals

To retrieve relevant information you need to be

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