Simple Search Engine Filters

One thing we all use almost everyday on the Internet is a search engine. With just a few simple “filters,” you can greatly improve your chances of finding what you’re looking for.

When I first started writing this column over five years ago, my second article was on search engines. Since then, I’ve seen a lot of improvements in their ease of use, and the relevancy of their results. Back then, search engines were not nearly as forgiving as they are today. Most of them would not let you type in exact phrases and you had to learn about “Boolean” algebra in order to refine your searches. Now, most search engines accept phrases though it’s still useful to understand how Boolean operators can enhance your searches.

Boolean operators are really very simple to use. The three most common are AND, OR, and NOT. Boolean operators act as filters in your searches. Let’s suppose that I was looking for information on the Beatles rock group. If I just search for Beatles, I’m likely to get quite a few hits on insects as well as for the fab five. So I might refine my search stating it like this, “Beatles” AND “music.” This way, the results returned will have to contain both the words “Beatles” and “music.” There might be a few musically inclined insects out there, but most likely, the majority of my hits will be for the musical group. You don’t have to stop with one AND. I could have said, “Beatles” AND “music” AND “London.” This would have farther limited my search to information on the Beatles, music, and London. Some search engines (Google) assume the AND between words.

The OR is a little trickier. You might use OR if you don’t want to be too specific in your search. OR means that at least one of your words must be matched in the search. For instance, I might be interested in finding information on, i.e. sports cars, Jaguar OR Corvette. In this instance, I’m looking for documents about sports cars, and then I’m filtering these documents to find only those that mention Jaguar, Corvette, or both.

NOT is the trickiest by far. Boolean NOT is used when you think that one of the results of your search might be totally out in the ozone. Let’s use the Beatles example again. I might have said Beatles NOT music. By stating my search in this manner, the search engine would look for documents that contained the word Beatles but with no mention of insects. Again, I might search for automobile, jaguar, NOT animal, thus excluding documents talking about the animal. These are simple yet very powerful filters that work with most search engines. You can also combine operators for even more filtering power.

Phrases can really cut down on the number of false hits when searching the Net. Unfortunately, you have to be careful. Search engines in general ignore common words like “a, an, is, the, and, or, etc.” So if you’re searching using a phrase, most search engines require you to enclose that phrase in quotes. Example: “To be or not to be.”

I mention Copernic www.copernic.com every so often as my favorite meta-search engine; Google is my favorite single search engine. It’s at www.google.com. Bring it up and look for the “advance search,” right next to where you enter your search criteria. This will bring up a form where you can refine your search so that only the most likely documents will be returned. Google has been voted as the #1 search engine on the Net. Reach me at randy@randybenjamin.com.