Ian asked me to do a few articles on search skills for his clients. He has a trivia site called Instant Trivia and people often need to find quite obscure pieces of information from only a few clues. It seemed like as good a place to start as any, so I will. Actually just a few qualifying additions to a search can make a big difference in the results you get.

Libraries and Universities often use something called Boolean Search and these terms can also be used successfully with most search engines. Using the words AND OR NOT and NEAR between keywords can greatly change your results. Always use them in upper case and generally speaking don’t otherwise use upper case.

Just by the way – Lower case will find both upper or lower case words. Full capitals is generally only used to find acronyms and initialisms like CSIRO and  first capitals can return better results for names such as London.

AND will return results for pages with both words on them only. This narrows a search.

OR will  return results for pages with either word on all pages. This widens a search.

NOT will return results for pages including the first word but not those that include the second. A great example of use for this might be if you were looking for pages on pythons. If you type in python NOT monty you will not be clogged up with pages about the comedy skit.

NEAR allows you to specify that two terms must appear close to each other on the page. Generally this means the two words will be within five words of each other.  For example the word sauce making with herbs will still be shown to you in results returned by a search for sauce NEAR herbs.

You can extend this technique with the use of brackets. For example sauce NEAR (sage AND basil AND herbs) will return any page with sauce on it that also contains either basil, sage or herbs near to it or you can widen the search even further by putting AND instead of NEAR.