KEYWORDS AND BOOLEAN OPERATORS (continued)

Special tips for Web Search Engines

• Use the + symbol to force your keywords. Some Internet search engines will only retrieve documents that contain all of your keywords, others will return documents that contain even one of the keywords. Using the + symbol in front of each of your keywords will instruct Internet search engines that you want only documents that contain ALL your keywords. Our previous search would look like this:
  +breeders +standard +poodles +Florida
  
  
• Group phrases together using quotation marks. When you want to locate words that are likely to be found together, in our example, "standard poodles," you can instruct the search engine to look for those words ONLY when they are found together by using quotation marks. So our example would look like this:
  +breeders +"standard poodles" +Florida
  
  
• Use words that are likely to be found in documents on you topic. This may sound obvious but often students will search for what they want not what is likely to be there. Take the example of statistics on teenage pregnancy. Students will use the key words statistics teenage pregnancy. But is the actual word "statistics" usually used when writing? It some cases the answer is yes, but what about phrases like "rates of teenage pregnancy" or "a forty percent increase in teenage pregnancy"? In neither of these cases is the word "statistics" used.
  
  
• Try a number of different combinations of keywords. As our previous example illustrates, often is necessary to use a variety of combinations of key words to make sure that you are retrieving as many relevant sources as possible.
  
  
• Try a number of different search engines. When searching on the Internet, be aware that no search engine covers all the documents available on the Web and they don't all cover the same documents.

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