Sherry's Thoughts on Education: Boolean Operators & Other Helpful Tools to Aid in Research

This week I learned a great deal about how to search for information. Google has several great tutorials on how to search the web. I am constantly doing research, and these tips will save me a lot of time. I have chosen a few to discuss below, but I think they are all beneficial, and all students should check them out.

First let’s look at Boolean Operators. These are symbols or words that can broaden or narrow the search as needed. I knew of the basic ones, “and” “or,” and “not.” What I did not know is there are several symbols that can also affect your search results. These shortcuts help save time and energy.

One of the biggest time savers I learned is Keywords. I always thought that to get the best results, you needed to use complete sentences. I know a lot of people make the same mistake I have made in the past. A few key words are all it takes to get accurate results. Also, capitalization and punctuation are unnecessary.

Google has a feature that allows you to search for a specific media type. If you want to use only news sources, then you search through the news media type. If you want to include a video source, you can search through the videos to find the one you are looking for.

These are some of the information that was knew to me. I learned a lot of great pointers to make my research time more efficient. I highly recommend these tutorials to anyone who wants to learn how to find information quicker and easier. I've included a link to some of these tutorials below.