Search exercises:

 

Try going to google or yahoo or another search engine and keying in:

 

John Adams house

 

Then try keying in:

 

“John Adams house”

 

Notice the difference in the number of retrievals and take a look at the things that are retrieved.  If you know an exact phrase you are looking at it can be helpful sometimes.

 

I frequently use a + to make sure the word is there when I do a search.  That is becoming less and less necessary since most engines today do check for all of the words in the list, but if I want to be very sure they are all there I do put a plus in front.

 

+John +Adams +house

 

A – can be used to eliminate a word.  Try the following two examples and compare the results:

Bush hurricane

 

+Bush +hurricane –Katrina

 

Now try these:

 

salt +pepper

 

salt –pepper

 

"salt & pepper"

 

Try the following searches and note the use of AND and OR:

 

malamute  AND  "Siberian husky"

 

malamute  OR “Siberian husky"

 

 

Note from Google: “By default, Google only returns pages that include all of your search terms. There is no need to include "and" between terms. Keep in mind that the order in which the terms are typed will affect the search results. To restrict a search further, just include more terms. For example, to plan a vacation to Hawaii, simply type vacation hawaii.”

 

 

 

Now we are going to try using NEAR, so try these two examples:

 

plague NEAR Europe

 

plague Europe

 

Now we are going to look at the situation where we want to find information about the Revolutionary War and either Lexington or Concord but we don’t want to require that both Lexington and Concord be discussed.  We can do this with parenthesis where we say essentially Revolutionary War and EITHER Lexington OR Concord.  We do this by putting the EITHER things in parenthesis, so we have the following:

 

"Revolutionary War" (Lexington OR Concord)

 

"Revolutionary War" AND (Lexington OR Concord)

 

Remember that Google does not require the AND, but it is better to have sometimes depending on the browser you are using.

 

Compare it to:

 

“Revolutionary War” Lexington Concord

 

Now we are going to look at the advanced features that browsers can support:  I am going to go to www.google.com and click on advanced search.

 

One of the things you can do is specify that you want to find results “with at least one of the words”.  If the words are separate, this is like using OR but I will show you some results below that are not as clean.

 

 

 

I did a search to find:  malamute  OR “Siberian husky"

I found that it is better to go with the OR.  Since I got things that had the word husky that were totally unrelated to dogs.  Try it!

 

 

 

Another thing you can do with Google advanced search is specify where you want to find the words.  In the example below, I said that I wanted them in the title of the page.  Since the author would put only key words in the title, this means that probably I would get some good matches.

 

Try selecting “in the title of the page” under occurrences and keying in worlds like elementary curriculum.  If the world works right, you should see articles that contain the words elementary and curriculum in the title.

 

Note that the advanced search lets you do some other interesting things like pick the type of file you want so you can specify only word documents or only PowerPoint presentations etc.

 

 

Experiment with a few other things like language and date to see what results you can develop.