There are many different ways that you can search. The following is a list of ways:
Sometimes when you want to search for exactly two or more phrases or words and which in all of these words must be in the results, AND searches are the answer. There are multiple ways of completing an AND search depending on the search engine.
Sometimes you might want to use such as the following example: Thinkquest 2000 AND My TQ. Or other times you can use the following: +Thinkquest 2000 +My TQ. We will now explain how to use each one. The first example is very simple as you probably know how to use it already now. You just write the first word or phrase that you want to search and write AND with another word or phrase that you want to search with. The second way is to write a plus sign in front of a word/phrase that you wan to include in your AND search. Other times when they ask you to an "all of words" search, that's the same thing.
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You can do proximity searches with certain search engines like AltaVista and Lycos. Proximity or a.k.a. NEAR searches are searches that produce more reasults and that search a different way than the normal way. Here's how: For example you searched for sandwich NEAR tuna. If you used AltaVista, you search for 10 words between sandwich and tuna. The following examples are search engines that definately have NEAR searching capabilities: AltaVista and Lycos. AltaVista have terms that are within 10 words of your search terms. Lycos' maximum is 25 words and you can control the amount of words by using a NEAR/ symbol. For example, you could write sandwich NEAR/7 tuna. In that example, Lycos would search for 7 words between sandwich and tuna.
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Here an example of a situation when you might need to use a NOT search. When you are doing a report on Carlos (a student in the Magic School Bus), you search for Carlos but you come with many sites devoted to the Monte Carlo in France. A way you could get out of this fix is you could use a NOT search. There are three ways of creating a NOT search. We will show you by using our example story above.
If you want a lot of results, you could use an OR search. If you know that there are different ways of stating your search query, than that is a good idea to use an OR search. Search engines provide different ways of doing an OR search. Some do an OR search automatically when you put a space between words. In the following example we state how it works: "Duck Hawk" "Peregrine Falcon" "Falco Peregrinus." Those were multiple ways of stating a Peregrine Falcon. Other search engines require that you use the word OR between them: "Duck Hawk" OR "Peregrine Falcon" OR "Falco Peregrinus." Still other search engines use another method, they ask you to use an "any or words" search. All of these are examples of an OR search.
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Sometimes search engines have words that they ignore. These are called stopwords. Every search engine ignores the following words: with, the, to, with, the Boolean operators (in a sentence or phrase other than the type of search that you are doing). Other words are ignored for a special purpose or that they are too common. Ways of preventing ignored stopwords are to enclose them in double quotes.
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A wildcard (a.k.a. truncation) is using an asterisk to find different versions of a word. For example, if you had data* as a wildcard, you would come up with database, dataware, etc. If you think about it, it's fairly simple.
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You can combine these techniques to create some pretty complex searches like: peregrine OR falco peregrinus NEAR person. Do what you need to make a great search. Good Luck!
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