You do not have to enter student, study, studied, students, or any other variation to search for all or some. They are called Wildcards because they allow the search tool to find variations on a word. * and ? and and ! and - and # – The wildcards are a very important part of Boolean searches. By putting the terms in quotation marks, you are telling the search engine to only find instances of both words together. Without quotation marks the search term New York would find every instance of the word New as well as every instance of the word York. For example, Subway and Sandwich, this will show results where both subway and sandwich have been mentioned.
For example, Subway NOT Station, this will exclude any articles mentioning station. In a Boolean search, quotation marks serve a specific function, which is to group words together. These are the three most common Boolean operators. They were used here to draw attention to the words. “…” – You have probably noticed that the examples included quotation marks around our search terms. Our example from the OR operator might be better expressed as “hotel” AND (“New York” OR “Big Apple”). They most commonly appear around OR search strings. (…)– Parenthesis in a Boolean search work the same way they do in math. In our previous example you might exclude the main city with a search string like “hotel” AND “New York” NOT “New York City.” NOT - anytime you use this expression, in capital letters, between two words, your search will exclude specific words. If you wish to exclude multiple terms, the NOT needs to be inserted before each term. Differently from other operators, it needs to stand before the term you wish to exclude. In our previous example, you might search for “hotel” AND “New York” OR “Big Apple.” The NOT operator tells a search engine what words to exclude from search results. This can be useful if your term has several synonyms or individuals who may not be listed individually. OR – anytime you use this expression, in capital letters, between two words, your search will find results that contain any of the search terms. This would limit the search results to only those documents containing the two keywords. NOT before a term will exclude profiles containing it from the search results.
For example, a Boolean search could be “hotel” AND “New York”. Boolean searches rely on specific modifiers including quotes, AND, NOT. There are FIVE Boolean operators (and the Wildcards).ĪND – anytime you use this expression, in capital letters, between two words, your search will find only results that contain all the search terms. A Boolean search is a type of search allowing users to combine keywords with operators (or modifiers) such as AND, NOT, and OR to further produce more relevant results.