Most people think of search engines as the magic 8 ball. Type in keywords, click “enter” and hope for the best. But if you really need to find something specific, this lazy approach fails. The actual search is all about creating a query. It starts out simple (one word), but becomes powerful when you start using Boolean operators. These are the logic gates of the Internet. This forces the engine to follow the rules instead of guessing.
Without these, you’re at the mercy of the algorithm’s best guess. With them, you rule.
Big 3: AND, OR, NOT
You probably know the basics. But do you know how the engine actually handles them?
*AND is strict. Every term it connects must be in the document. This is the intersection. When you search for cats AND dogs, the results should include both. Some engines are lazy and replace the word AND with a plus sign +. Same logic. Less typing.
OR is generous. Search for “at least one” term. This is an extension tool. cats OR dogs grabs pages that contain cats, pages that contain dogs, and pages that contain both. It widens the net.
NOTT is exclusionary. Remove the noise. If you search for “Jaguar” but don’t like the car, jaguar NOTT car will remove the car search results. In many engines you can use the hyphen - instead of NOTT. jaguar -car. Cleaner. Faster.
Phrase and proximity search
Boolean isn’t just about inclusion; It’s about position.
Enclosing a word in quotation marks forces an exact phrase search. “artificial intelligence” will not return results if “artificial” and “intelligence” appear on the same page but are far apart in the text. They must sit together.
Then there are the proximity operator. These are rare for the average user, but valuable for researchers.
- FOLLOWED BY demands adjacency. Term A must immediately precede term B.
- Near allows wiggle room. Specify the distance.
NEAR/5can mean that terms can be up to five words apart. Look for concepts that are related but not glued together.
Googlewhack Game
Search engines are such a part of our daily lives that people have turned them into a game. Enter Googlewhacking.
This goal is very difficult. Type two words into Google hoping for exactly one result. One single web page on the internet that contain these two words. This is called pure whack.
A strange balance is required. Choose two common words? You will get millions of clicks. Pick two obscure words would you choose? Zero. You have to find the sweet spot. unrelated enough to be rare, but common enough to exist.
After you crack it, you can submit your discovery to www.googlewhack.com. Your name (or alias) will appear on The Whack Stack. This is a leaderboard for the technically obsessed.
Current entries include expressions such as “ambidextrous scallywags”. A phrase so specific, so oddly constructed,
