1. Yr 12 OCR Nationals – LEVEL 3 Unit 2 – January 2009

2. Search techniques AND OR NOT NEAR Boolean AND OR NOT NEAR Boolean Keywords Wildcards Quotation marks + - Advanced search options/pages

3. Getting the grades PASS = 2 search techniques MERIT = 3 DISTINCTION = 5 (Yes, 5!) Then USE THESE TECHNIQUES in different search engines on the same searches to compare results: PASS = 2 search engine types MERIT = 3 DISTINCTION = 4

4. AND OR NOT NEAR Boolean Already seen AND OR NOT So what will NEAR do? Well? Try it! Impact is to find the words near each other – compare this with AND results.

5. Keywords As computer professionals we use these all the time – check out Look how Google does it for you: Keywords help make results more focused. They help them arrive faster too – search for fewer words

6. Wildcards A wildcard is: * any number of characters (including none) ? a single character # any single numeric character @ any single alpha character (A..Z, a..z) $ any single alphanumeric character ] Thus, man* would retrieve entries containing the word man or any word which began with those three letters. M?n would retrieve entries containing the words man or men, as would m@n. 2@, 2#, and 2? would, respectively, retrieve (1) the four words where 2 was followed by a single letter; (2) the ten words where 2 was followed by a single numeral; and (3) all two-character words beginning with 2.

7. Quotation marks Quotation marks control the search more specifically, though nowadays these are less rigidly enforced. “Shakespeare” will ignore all those entries where his name is spelt with a lower case ‘s’ “OCR Nationals” will only include websites where the two words look just like that.

8. + - Ah the good ol’ days… used to use these all the time: Minus sign acts as a NOT operator You may find you need a space before the minus sign and no space after. E.G. Red –shoes returns items that have red in the title and do NOT have shoes in the title. Plus sign acts mostly as an AND operator harry potter +dvd returns only items that have harry and potter and dvd in the title.

9. Advanced search options/pages Takes your beloved Google from this: To this:

10. Reminder