Created By, Ms. Jennifer Duke

Young children tend to want to ask questions like “Who is the president?” rather than type in a keyword. You may have done this before as well. Simply typing in questions is not the most effective way to search the internet.

When searching the internet, using Boolean Operators can help you to have a more focused search!

Boolean Operators are simple words used to combine or exclude keywords in a search, which results in more focused and productive results. Some examples of Boolean Operators are the words NOT, AND, and OR.

When searching for information use words such as NOT, AND, and OR to narrow your search.

AND requires both terms to be located in each website returned. If one term is contained in the document and the other is not, the website is not included in the resulting list. EXAMPLE A search on stock market AND trading includes results containing the following: stock marked trading, trading on the stock market, and trading on the late afternoon stock market.

OR results in either search term (or both) in the webpage. EXAMPLE A search on ecology OR pollution includes results containing the following: documents containing the word ecology (but not pollution), other documents containing the word pollution (but not ecology), and documents with ecology and pollution.

OR broadens the search AND narrows the search.

When looking for an exact phrase or name, put quotation marks around what you are searching for to find the entire phrase. Example: “internet marketing”

Use the * for truncation. The * expands a search term to include all forms of a root word. For Example: patent* retrieves patent, patents, patentable, patented, etc.

Use specific terms rather than general terms to narrow your results. GeneralSpecific DogLabrador CarHonda Civic

Examples of Search Engines: Google.comBing.com Yahoo.comYoutube.com GoogleImages.comAsk.com BingImages.comGo.com Windows Live SearchDogpile.com All search engines serve a different purpose. Not every search engine will return the same number or kind of results.