How to Search the GoS Site
Boolean Logic, was developed by the 19th century English mathematician, George Boole. It offers a powerful way of searching electronic databases and the Internet. Boolean logic operators AND and NOT will always narrow your search, and allow you to be more specific. They decrease the number of citations retrieved by the database or search engine. The Boolean operator OR will do the opposite. OR explodes the number of search results, giving you dramatically increased numbers of citations returned by your search. Use Boolean operators to make your searches more accurate, quick and relevant to your needs.
AND is the most frequently used operator. A search using AND will look like this:
In the search above we are trying to find information about how zinc affects the common cold. Note that this is an AND search but we did not type out:
cold and zinc
This is because most search engines understand a space between two words to mean exactly the same thing as typing the word AND. By putting <cold zinc> (without the brackets) into a search box, it is exactly the same as typing <cold and zinc>. Typing <cat possum skunk raccoon> is exaclty the same as typing <cat and possum and skunk and raccoon>.
Every time you add a word to an AND search you will get fewer and fewer results from your search. That is to say, if we search <poverty> we might get back 4,420,000 hits. Way too many to look at! But if we refine that search by adding more search terms, we will get fewer hits and they will be closer to what we really want to know.
poverty = 4,420,000
Now we're down to 124 hits on a very specific topic. See how using the AND operator focuses your search quickly and effectively?
NOT is the second most frequently used Boolean operator. Like AND, it dramatically reduces the number of search results you get, when you use more words. But unlike AND, NOT tells the search engine words that you do not want to see in your search results. You do not have to type the word NOT. Just use a minus sign in front of each of the terms that you do not want in your search. This is particularly useful when you are searching a site like eBay. In the following example, we want to buy a pager from eBay - not pager accessories.
pager = 1050
We've cut the original list in half, and we could cut it even more just by adding one brand name to our search.
The last Boolean operator, OR, is used to generate more results. A search using OR will look like this:
= 4,810,000 hits (This is an AND search)
The best time to use the OR search is when you are not sure how to spell your search terms or there is more than one legitimate name of the thing you are searching. That is use OR when your topic has more than one name. For example:
OR "edgar allen poe" OR "edgar allan poe" OR
poe OR "ea poe"
The last thing you need to know to be an effective database searcher is the Phrase Search. Use Phrase Searches when you want to find two or more words together in exact order. Place the words you want to find in quotation marks to keep them together. Phrase searches make finding lyrics, organizations, speeches and contests easy. For example:
These are examples
of blended searches. For the most searching power, blend AND,
NOT and Phrase Searches: