Boolean Operators in Internet Searching

We all search the Internet frequently for specific information.Supposing you are looking for the topic: Cinematic techniques used by James Joyce in his novels. The first and the obvious way to search for the topic is to type the word James Joyce in the search box of the search engine. This would yield a large number of pages of sites related to James Joyce as also all James and all the Joyce pages. Opening all these pages and browsing them for specific topic of cinematic techniques is a very tedious job. Are there any short cuts ?

Well yes there are short cuts and these are called Boolean operators based on the Boolean logic (after George Boole,18th cent.Mathematician). Boolean operators are used to combine search concepts in a more precise way than is possible with word searching.

The few important ones are discussed below:

AND:
The AND operator narrows a search to include only those web pages that contain both keywords. The search syntax for our above query would be; james AND joyce AND cinematic AND techniques. AND operators are a great way of limiting the numbers of search results because they link two subjects to create a new query subject for the engine.Thus the engine will only search for web pages on the Internet that will include all the four subjects.

OR:
The OR operator broadens searches to include web pages/ web sites that contain any keywords of the search. The search query in our case could be; joyce OR joycean OR joyces. OR operators can be useful when searching for alternative spellings,or searching for synonyms e.g.in our case; techniques OR concepts OR methods

NOT:
The NOT operator narrows a search to exclude certain keywords. Say searching for james joyce cinematic techniques we don't want the search engine to open web sites relating to James Joyce Foundation, James Joyce Society etc. The query will then be; james AND joyce NOT foundation

NEAR:
NEAR operators work similarly to AND operators, retrieving only those web pages that contain both keywords, but NEAR operators further limit the search results by requiring that the keywords be within ten words of each other. This is especially important in our case of a proper name search because when we look for james and joyce the engine will also open pages of james dean, james hill, james watt, james smith etc. and similarly of richard joyce and william joyce etc. Use of NEAR operator will open only pages of james joyce. The query will thus be james NEAR joyce.

IMPORTANT:
It is very important to note the in all the discussion above the operators have been mentioned in uppercase and the searched words in lowercase. This is essential, because if operators are mentioned in lower case the search engines will ignore them as these are the most commonly occurring words in any web page.

The major search engines all permit Boolean searching, but they vary in the syntax they require. Learning the fine points of a particular search engine will greatly improve the precision of your queries. This fine tuning to the major engines like Google, Altavista, Excite, Northern Light, Hotbot, Lycos, Yahoo, Web crawler, Infoseek etc. will be discussed in another article.