Transcript: Jaylon

Researching now adays can be long, frustrating, and tedious for numerous reasons! There is an abundance of sources and material that are on the Internet that finding exactly what you are looking for can be a difficult task. This is why precision searching and your search statements matter more than you might think.

During the searching process of research there is a point where you move from just identifying a main concept to creating deeper and more complicated search statement. Here are a couple of tips and real-life examples that can strengthen your precision searching skills.

The first useful skill that researchers, like yourself, can use when searching are quotation marks around phrases. Putting quotation marks around phrases tells the search engine to only give sources that contain that exact phrase.

A good example of this would be the “United States”, when put into quotations only sources with the “United States” will come up, but if you didn’t use quotations then sources that contain sentences like “the states that are united…” This is important to just make 100% that what you are looking for is what you are going to find.

Another useful skill to have when researching is the wildcard. The wildcard on the keyboard is “shift-8” and when used correctly it can make help you search for a plethora of material with one search.

A good example of this is if a student was making a presentation over knitting. They could type in their search engine “Knitting instruct*” with an asterisk at the end. Their results could contain results from knitting instructors to knitting instructions. The last useful tip we will touch on today to improve your precision searching is the use of Boolean operators to include or exclude subsets of sources.

The three Boolean operators are AND, OR, and NOT. AND is the simplest and is automatically used in most common search engines like Bing and Google. If your main idea contains two or more ideas then the Boolean AND will search for information containing sources with both terms combined.

A good example of this would be if a student were researching a topic about the recent testosterone levels of men, they could search testosterone levels and men.

The OR Boolean will bring back sources that contain at least one of the terms you searched. If a law student were looking for cases about death penalty or life with no parole”, then a simple OR between these two terms will give results that contain just one of those terms.

The last type of Boolean is the NOT Boolean. Using NOT, or the “minus” sign, with whatever term you want to exclude from your search directly after a term or phrase will give you material which does not contain that specific term.

An example of this would be Fighting Movies -Rocky. This would give you tons of information over fighting movies but none about Rocky!