Week of January 18th

To review last week's lessons in College Research Class, I learned that each AND added to my search query further narrows the search results to fewer. However, these pages will be more relevant than those with less specific or broader search. I also learned that a good time to use AND is when my initial keyword or phrase search finds too many irrelevant results.


This week in College Research Class, I learned how to use plus signs in my search. The plus sign is usually not required to represent the Boolean operator AND. I learned that when you enter more than one keyword, ANS is assumed by most search engines. However, in some search tools, you might have to us the plus sign (+) or AND. It is very useful to use the plus sign because it can prevent search engines from looking for words that it would normally ignore. The plus sign functions sort of like quotation marks around a phrase. When you use the plus sign, you have to leave a space in front of it, and no space between it. Also, the keyword is connecting to the first keyword.


This week in College Research Class, I also learned how to expand my search with the OR operator. The AND Boolean operator narrows your search, while the OR Boolean operators expands or broadens your results. When connecting keywords in your search with OR, the search engine automatically lists every Web page that contains any of the keywords. In the results, every page returned must have at least one of the keywords on it but it does not need to have both or more. Lastly, each OR added to your search will expand the search to include more Web pages.