Carefully Select Your Search Terms

Broad or general terms will return thousands of possible sites.  Try to use terms that are more specific to your topic.  To narrow your terms, look at sites that you already have found and that are relevant to your topic.  Identify possible search terms from those sites.  You also can combine terms, using Boolean Operators.

Use Boolean Operators

Boolean operators are words that allow you to combine search terms in most search engines.

AND

AND tells the search engine to find both terms on the same site.  For instance, entering "business AND ethics" would instruct the search engine to find web pages that contain both words, "business" and "ethics."

OR

OR instructs the search engine to find one term or the other.  Entering "business OR ethics" would cause the search engine to look for web pages that contain either the word "business" or the word "ethics," but not necessarily both words.  As you can imagine, if you use OR, the search engine could return thousands of sites.

OR is most useful when the same term may appear in two different ways.  For instance, you could use "national football league"* OR NFL to find web pages about the national football league.

*If you want your search engine to search for an exact phrase, put quotation marks around the phrase.

NOT

NOT tells the search engine to find pages that contain the first word but not the second.  This limitation is helpful when you know your search term is likely to appear with another term that does not interest you.

NEAR

NEAR only appears in some search engines, but it tells the search engine only to return web pages in which the terms are near each other.  Usually the terms are within a few words of each other.

Symbols

For many search engines, you can use "+" as a substitute for AND and "-" as a substitute for NOT. You can also use quotation marks to indicate that you want to find an exact phrase.

Learn How Each Specific Site Works

Each search engine is slightly different from the others, but they all have Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) or instructions that explain how that specific site works.  Taking a few minutes to read these FAQs before you start searching will save you lots of time later.

Tips for Choosing a Search Tool

Created by Jessie Moore