Advance
Internet-Search Cheat Sheet
AND/OR
SEARCHES
Using
parentheses to group keywords can help refine your search. Here are
some things to remember about AND/OR searches:
Databases
process two words with only a space between them as if AND was
between them. For example, civil war is the same as civil AND
war.
AND
narrows a search: the more terms you add, the more specific your search
will be. Every book or article MUST have ALL those terms in order to be
a match.
Use
OR to expand your search, grouping terms in parentheses.
For example, (administration OR management) and conflict will
get booth on administration and conflict as well as books on management
and conflict.
PHRASES
You
can also use quotation marks to indicate a phrase, or to use AND, OR,
and NOT as part of a phrase For example, you can search for
“human resources”, or “World War II” or “separation of church and
state”.
TRUNCATION
Truncation
allows you to search for different spellings of a term by substituting
some letters with an asterisk. For example , (twain and huck*) and
criticism will get Huck or Huckleberry.
WILDCARDS
Wildcards
are symbols (usually a question mark) used inside a word to search for
different spellings. For example, wom?n will retrieve women and woman.
SEARCH
MODIFICATIONS IN GENERAL SEARCH ENGINES
site: and
add domain
.edu
(US colleges and universities),
.gov
(US government),
.org
(non-profit organizations),
.mil
(US military)
define:
and
add a word or phrase
definitions
of words or phrases from around the Web.
Also
see the Google Cheat Sheet at: http://www.google.com/intl/en/help/cheatsheet.html
