Suggestions for Conducting Keyword Searches

By Theresa, on April 12th, 2010

Ever found yourself looking for something on the internet, only to come up with everything BUT? Try these tips to help you get more out of your searches:

Use quotation marks around a phrase to limit your search, i.e. “single motherhood” will give you results related to single motherhood, while a search without quotation marks will result in searches that use the word single as well as motherhood.
Use AND to join words that must appear in a document. For example, education AND history would provide results that mention both education and history. For some searches, you might need to use the plus (+) sign instead of AND.
Use OR to indicate synonyms when only one needs to appear in the document, i.e. car OR vehicle would provide more results than just car or vehicle.
Use an asterisk (*) to indicate letters that may vary in the particular spelling of a word, or words that might have different endings. For example, a search for “child psycholog*” will find sources with the words psychology, psychologist, psychologists, and so forth.
Place NOT before words that should not appear in the document. For example, Kleenex NOT tissues, would result in sources on the brand name or company, not the item itself. In some searches, you may need to use a minus (-) sign instead of NOT.
Use parentheses to group together keywords and combine the group with another set of keywords. For example, (notebook OR tablet OR paper) AND production would provide results on the production of any of these three items.