List of videos for Search Engines
Search Engines: Searching Tips and Tricks
The video to the left highlights how to use both keyword and Boolean search techniques. In addition, check out this article from Time magazine listing tricks to enhance your Google search.
Phrases with quotes
Putting quotation marks around keywords yields results containing the exact phrase.
Why is this technique important?
For example, maybe you wanted to research market share information for Apple (the computer company). If you just search Apple and the term "market share," then you could possibly get results about the fruit and produce market. But if you search "Apple Inc" and "market share," you will get results that focus on Apple, the company. This technique is particularly useful if you are searching for a company or product name or the title of a book or article, and also if you are looking for a specific categorization, such as "market share" or "market size."
Parentheses
When you conduct a search, you can also use ( ) to help you group and combine terms. The search engine will search for what is grouped or nested inside the parentheses first. For example, to find articles about privacy issues associated with Fitbit, you could craft the following search:
(wearables OR fitbit OR smart jewelry) and privacy issues
This technique is particularly useful if a number of terms are used to describe the same idea. You can then use the Boolean operator OR to combine the words and the parentheses to group them together.