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Advanced Search Techniques
It is quite easy to get discouraged when searching the Internet. Just
about any search can result in hundreds, thousands, or even millions of
"hits." For example, suppose you wanted to track down information
concerning community college online science courses. You choose to use
Google and use the following key words: community college online science
courses.
A simple search will list EVERY site that has ANY of the keywords
entered!!!
This lists approximately 11,000,000 sites. Obviously you can not
possible view the millions of "hits", you do not wish to see courses
that are from social sciences, fire sciences, etc., and you only wish to
view community college information. Therefore, it is essential that one
knows how to customize searches using the
various search locations available on the Net.
Tips, Tools, & Tricks To Advanced Searches
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The
more specific you can be, the better. Don't worry about
redundancy--synonyms can help narrow the field of your search. Leave
out nonessential words like prepositions and articles (of, to, the,
and so on)--most search engines ignore them anyway.
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Add
"Boolean Operators". That's just a fancy name for the words AND, OR,
NEAR, AND NOT. Most search engines accept the symbols + and - for
AND, and NOT, respectively. By entering these operators between each
keyword, it is quite easy to instantly decrease the number of hits,
thus achieving a much higher relevance.
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Surround specific keywords with quotation marks. This requires the
search engine to locate the EXACT PHRASE in order for it to be
returned as a "hit."
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Use
wildcards such as * to include extra letters following the keyword
letters entered.
Now if you redo the search with the following:
1.
Place quotation marks around "community college"
2. Place a minus sign in front of keywords you’re not interested in
such as -social and -fire and -political
Adding
quotes and using the "-" sign will eliminate 10 million hits! However,
there are still more than a million hits to view - still too many. You
will need to refine the search even more.
Try
surrounding "online science courses" with quotes to see if you can find
that exact phrase on a Web site. In doing so, the search eliminated 4/5
of the hits above and the first hit on the list is quite relevant.
You’re getting closer to a manageable number of hits but 345,000 is
still too many.
Suppose
you’re interested in "earth science" hits only. Unfortunately, entering
the phrase "earth science online courses" yields no hits so you should
try searching with "earth science" & "online course". This yields an
even smaller number of hits and most of the first ten links are
relevant.
There
is another way to narrow a search - search just the TITLES of Web
documents!
Use the title: operator to search for keywords and key phrases in the
titles of documents.
This brings back only 42 hits! Please keep in mind that there may be
hits eliminated that are quite relevant but fail to have your keyword
choices in the title of the document.
In case you were wondering:
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