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

Today, we’ll finish this series of 3 entries with the last one:

3) 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.

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

We continue this series of 3 entries with the second one:

2) Expand

• Do not forget that search engines can differ between languages in terms of locating content. If you want to expand the search to the entire Internet (and therefore get many more results), don’t narrow your search to websites written only in your language.
• Automatic filters are not perfect, and if there are no children using your user account and you don´t mind the occasional explicit or risqué image, you should also deactivate the content filters.
• Searches don’t just come in text form: remember that most browsers also allow you to locate images, videos, news, blogs or forums, so if you can’t find what you want within normal results, stretch the reach of your search to different kinds of sites.
• Some search engines offer the possibility of expanding your results with “related searches“:  use it!

More to come

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

Let’s see what each rule involves when applied to key word searches and what benefits you’ll get if you apply them to the letter.

1) Restrict

• Avoid terms that are too general and “buzzwords” from the start, and cut the results you get back in half.
• Only use nouns as query keywords. Never use articles (a, the), pronouns (he, it), conjunctions (and, or), or prepositions (to, from).
• Limit your query to no more than 8 keywords.
• Check your word order, spelling, and use lower case letters (certain search engines are “case sensitive” which means they will only take into account words that are spelled correctly).
• Use speech marks where possible if your search contains several words you want it to take into account, e.g. “The Grand Canyon”.
• Use the + sign and fine tune your search, e.g. to look for information that pertains only to homemade chicken soups: homemade+chicken+soup.

More to come