Tips for Using Search Engines

Phrase Searching: This can be useful. Contain a phrase in quotations, so the words in that phrase are searched as a discrete unit, rather than individually. For instance, if you type "Berkshire Community College Lifelong Learning" as a Google search you will get 3 hits. Take out the quotations and you will get 92,100 items to sift through. Be aware that stop words, such as prepositions, may not be searched, depending on the Search Engine. You may be able to add words though, for instance typing + in Google. To learn more about Phrase Searching in a particular Search Engine, check any help or tutorial pages provided.

Required word search: In these searches a particular word or words needs to be somewhere in the document. To learn more about Required Word Searching check help or tutorial pages provided.

Exclude word search: In this type of search a word must not be in a particular document. In Boolean searching this is the NOT function.

Default multiword search: In this case, you just type words without using terms like AND or +. The default operator is used by the Search Engine to connect these words. In Boolean searching this is the AND function.

Specific Search Tools: Check the help and tutorial pages for a particular Search Engines search options. For instance, Google permits a synonym search by adding the symbol ~.

Look for either word: This choice means that either one item or another is present in a document. In Boolean searching this is the OR function.

Truncation: Truncation is used to indicate that you wish to have a number of options to indicate a word's ending. Often it entails putting the * symbol at the end of a root word. For instance, psycholog* may be typed so that the search would include all words with this root. (psychology, psychologist, etc) Truncation should be used judiciously as it could reduce your results considerably.