Step
five: Combining ideas - How to construct your searches
Keyword
Searching
Keyword searching involves the use of
words, phrases or a combination of the two. Any words or
phrases may be used, however some words or phrases may be more successful than others. Keep
your keyword searches simple!!!
Use the word
"and" to combine two or more search
terms. Your searches should combine the multiple ideas covered in your topic. Using
"and" narrows or focuses your
search. By adding search terms using
"and" the number of results
retrieved will decrease.
Search examples: alcohol
anddriving and teenagers
drunk
driving and teenagers
and statistics
In Library
periodical databases, type your search exactly as it appears above.
Web search engines work the same
way, you could type the same searches as above or omit the word "and". Most search engines
today automatically assume the word
"and" so there is no need to type
it!
Search example: alcohol driving teenagers
An example
using the Google search engine would look
like: alcohol driving teenagers
An
"and" search will retrieve any web
page that contains all 3 of the search terms. Using our search example above, each Web
page in the result list should include the terms: alcohol, driving, and teenagers.
Note:
In constructing your searches, leave out any prepositions or
articles such as: in, among, for, about, the that, etc. Also,
do not use complete sentences or
questions as your search terms. Although there are
some search engines that allow for this "natural language" searching
(Ask Jeeves), most search engines perform best using
keywords only.
