Why Use + And Other Boolean Operators When Searching The Internet

When using certain search engines to find websites that are relevant to a particular topic

, it can be quite annoying to find that many of the search results are not all related to the key phrases or key words that you entered. What's even more annoying is that you visit those webpages, you will find out that these are just pages that contain mostly advertisements for certain products that are not even related to your search.

To reduce the time that you spend going though irrelevant search results, you can refine your search by using Boolean operators such as "+" and "-."

* Use "+" to "tell" the search engine that the words must be included in the search results.

Affix the "+" sign before every word that must be present in the pages that will appear in the search results. For example, if you would like all of the search results to have the term "review," then type "+review" at the search bar to instruct the search engine to ignore results that do not mention the term. This is help you get rid of irrelevant pages that contain advertisements for products that you have no interest in.

* Use "-" to "tell" the search engine to remove from the search results any page that includes the term.

On the other hand, use the "-" sign to tell the search engine to ignore the results that contain a specific term. For example, if you are looking for home remedies and would like to eliminate results that mention branded products, you may add "-brand" to your search term. This will get rid of those pages that feature branded products. Use this Boolean operator with caution, though. There is a possibility that relevant and useful search results are disregarded by the search engines. Just imagine if there is an article that mentions how a home remedy compares with a specific brand. Such pages will be ignored by the search engines.

* Use " " to enclose words that should come together when mentioned in the webpage.

One of the reasons that search engines come up with diverse results is because you have entered a lot of search terms. And even though all of those terms appear in the webpage, they are very far apart from one another. Solve this problem by using double quotation marks to enclose important phrases that should always be together. For example, if you would like to search on "free mobile ringtones," use the double quotes to eliminate the results that mention "free" "mobile" or "ringtones" in different parts of the page.

Boolean operators are advanced methods to enhance the features of the search engines. However, as search engine companies continue to develop their products, search engines can now come up with more relevant results even without the use of Boolean operators.

by: Brian Jones

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