Can’t find it? Don’t stress out! Here are some tips on how to search smarter (part 3 of 3)

To increase the number of useful results you get from your searches, it is best to always keep in mind the 3 golden rules for searches:

1) Restrict, 2) Expand, and 3) Obtain.

Today, we'll finish this series of 3 entries with the last one.

Obtain

Get use to using "boolean" commands (named after George Boole, the 19th-century mathematician who founded the field of symbolic logic) to narrow your search down to reasonable numbers and obtain the best results.  The three most commonly used are AND, OR and AND NOT:

1. AND means "I want only documents that contain both/all words." e.g. "New York" AND "Empire State" AND "Flatiron" would return only those documents that contained all three keywords or phrases.
2. OR means "I want documents that contain either word; I don't care which."  So the query "New York" OR "Empire State" OR "Flatiron" would return all documents containing at least one of those keywords or phrases.  Be careful about mixing it with AND!
3. AND NOT means "I want documents that contain this word, but not if the document also contains another word."  Here the query "New York" AND "Empire State" AND NOT "Flatiron" would return documents that include New York and Empire State, but not those that also include Flatiron.  AND NOT only applies to the word/phrase that immediately follows it and in some search engines can be recognized as BUT NOT.

Remember that the Internet is a veritable monster of information with, as of 2009, over 110 million operating websites!  Since the Internet lacks a cyber librarian to organize all that information, an effective Internet search can take a couple of tries but isn't impossible to achieve.

Try the 3 golden rules of searches with Finday, where besides obtaining excellent results, you'll get useful ratings and reviews to help you further refine your searches.