Module 4 - Boolean Searches

Taking the same key words of your last search, think about how you would best search for the following:

• the biggest number of hits relating to these key words
• information most relevant to what you ACTUALLY wanted to look for!
• information coming only from university sources

• Discuss your strategies with the class and record the exact search terms you used in your learning log

The best way to get the biggest number of hits relating to the key words is to use an or statement. I've gone back to google so i can compare my results.

Under "advanced search" i selected "must contain at least one of these words" which means it will include one or the other or both (an OR statement). The number of results were almost 30 million.

To ensure that the information is more acurate, and that it is more what i'm looking for, in this case an AND statement would be more appropriate, or under the advanced search it would be "with all the words". The number of results returned was 162, 000.

Adding the word university into the AND statement (with all the words) i got 156, 000 results.

If i wanted to ensure that the searches were not just containing the word university, but also from an education site, i could also say in the advanced search taht i wanted the demain to be .edu.au. When i do this i get 8,710 results.

i can vaguely remember doing boolean searches in my computer science days, and venn diagrams in both previous uni courses so this is a familiar concept to me.