Understanding how to search

Search engines are powerful tools, and often a simple keyword search is all that is required to get the results you need.

Sometimes your search may not return relevant results, or you might have to scan through pages of results to find something useful. There are a number of options to help you limit the responses to those most relevant to your search.

We will consider some of the more advanced options in the next step but firstly it is important to understand how to ask the right questions of your search engine, to make your search as effective as it can be.

Search engines and databases use ‘operators’ (AND, OR and NOT) to allow you to combine search terms in different combinations. You may have seen these operators before as buttons or drop-down menus, especially in databases. These ‘operators’ are extremely powerful and using different combinations of them drastically change the results that are generated.

Drawing on a topic that we will research later this week let’s take a look at some examples of how they work:

AND

AND reduces the number of results you retrieve and is usually used to combine different concepts to make your results more relevant. For example, when only wanting information about the Shakespearean play ‘Richard III’.

The shaded area in the middle represents what will be searched for when you combine two separate searches for Richard III AND Shakespeare. This search will only return sources where both Richard III and Shakespeare are referenced.

OR

OR increases the number of results you retrieve and is usually used to combine synonyms to make your results more comprehensive. For example, when wanting information about Richard III and the War of the Roses.

The shaded area inside both of these circles represents what will be searched for when you combine two separate searches for Richard III OR War of the Roses. This search will return all sources for Richard III and all sources for War of the Roses, including those instances where a source references both searches.

NOT

NOT reduces the number of results you retrieve by excluding a search term. It should be used with caution in case you inadvertently exclude relevant references. For example, you may use this search when wanting information about Richard III but specifically not wanting information relating to the Shakespearean play ‘Richard III’.

The shaded area represents what will be searched for when you search for Richard III NOT Shakespeare. This search will return all sources relating to Richard III except those that also reference Shakespeare.

You may find that the search engine you use prefers a hyphen (‑) to be used in place of the ‘NOT’ operator. For example, ‘Richard III -Shakespeare’.