Internet Search Strategies
Using Advanced Strategies to Find What You Really Want
What Strategies Do You Use to Find What You Need?

How Do You Find What You Need?

There are Oceans of information out there, so how do you find what you need? Often there are way too many results. You need to find a way to reduce the results to find what you need..

Google Is a Popularity Contest   
​How does Google decide what you want? Ever wonder how Google works? There are spiders, indexes, and page rank. What goes on behind the scenes...

Using Advanced Search w/Boolean Operators

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The search box found at the top of every page should provide excellent results for most of your searching requirements. It has a default keyword search plus additional options, each of which has been tuned to get complete results for most search types. For those occasions where you have a particular kind of search in mind, you can use Advanced Search. It has tools that enable you to describe precisely where and how you want to search. You can do Boolean searches using the controls on the page, or by typing directly in the advanced Boolean query box.

About Boolean Searches
A Boolean search uses parentheses to group terms and “operators” such as AND, OR, or NOT to limit the search results. A search for potter NOT harry would find titles by Beatrix Potter but not about Harry Potter. On the advanced search page, this could also be entered as (potter) -(harry). Similarly, ( (mark twain) OR (samuel clemens) ) AND (tom sawyer) would look for either Mark Twain or Samuel Clemens, and Tom Sawyer.

Narrows Your Search

Broadens Your Search (+)

Narrows Your Search (-)

To Construct a Query
Search Tips In a Basic Search you'll receive results that contain all of your search terms. These may match keywords in a title, author names, subjects, abstract, or other descriptions.
Use the Advanced Search to pre-limit your search to specific fields, material types, or publication dates.
Use the Filters to limit to items available online or physically available in the library. You can also include or exclude particular material types, dates, authors, subjects, or library locations.
The * character can be used as a wildcard in place of one or more characters. [Examples: recycl*, organiz*, wom*n]
Enclosing your search in quotes " " will only return results with an exact match. [Examples: "global warming", "Affordable Care Act", "mutual funds"]
Searches can also be nested in ( ), combined with " " and Boolean operators AND, OR, NOT. [Example: "World War II" AND (sites OR battles) NOT (Normandy OR Pearl Harbor)]