LSCI 100

USING ANDs & ORs IN GOOGLE SEARCHES

When you use Google to search for websites, you can apply the same advanced search strategy that you learned in Lesson 3 when you searched for articles in periodical databases such as Gale PowerSearch.  Begin by completing a search worksheet for your research question, just as you did in the advanced search on PowerSearch.  (If you are continuing with the same research question you used previously, and your search worksheet worked effectively in PowerSearch, you can use the same search worksheet for your Google search.)  

 

However, when you search in Google, instead of the 3 or more search boxes provided in the advanced search mode of most periodical databases, you will only have one search box to enter your entire search statement. In a basic Google search, you will enter all of your concepts and search terms in the single search box, so your search statement will often be relatively long.  (There is an Advanced Search mode on Google, which will be discussed below, but there are limitations in using the Google Advanced Search, so it is very effective if you learn how to use some key features of the basic search mode.)

For an example of how to construct a Google search statement, let’s use the same research question and search worksheet that we used in Lesson 3:

What is the effect of illegal immigration on the U.S. economy?

CONCEPT #

Search Terms

 

1

illegal immigration

illegal aliens

undocumented workers

x

x

2

economy

economics

x

x

x

3

U.S.

United States

American

x

x



Guidelines for Google searches: 
 

·        be as precise as possible-- use at least one search term from each of your concepts;

·        put quote marks around phrases (multiple search words that go together), e.g. “illegal immigration”;

·        ORs are required when linking synonymous or related search terms for the same concept. ORs must be capitalized in Google.

·       It is helpful to add parentheses around each concept to make it easier to see and organize your concepts.

·         ANDs are placed between concepts to tell Google to look for all of the concepts

·         Truncation symbols (*) are not used in Google.  Do not use them. 
(Google will do automatic truncation for many search words.)

Following these guidelines, let’s develop a Google search statement from the search worksheet example above.

Let’s start with the first concept.  First, (just like in the periodical databases) we need to put ORs between each search term for the same concept.  Next, since each of the search terms for our first concept are phrases, in Google we need to put quote marks around each.  Thus, the first part of our Google search statement (representing our first concept) looks like this:

“illegal immigration” OR “illegal aliens” OR “undocumented workers”

For our second concept—economy OR economics—we used the truncation symbol (econom*) in the PowerSearch databases.  Since Google does not use truncation, we cannot use the *. Google uses stemming technology which means that, when appropriate, it will search not only for your search terms, but also for different words with the same root.  For example, if you search for economy Google will also automatically search for economies OR economic OR economist, and other variations of the term. Any variants of your terms that were searched for will be highlighted in the snippet of text accompanying each result. So the second part of our Google search statement (representing our second concept) will look simply like this:

economy

Our third concept—U.S. OR United States OR American—only requires the addition of quote marks around the phrase: “United States” to make the last part of our Google search statement look like this:

U.S. OR “United States” OR American

Now we can put all of our concepts into a complete Google search statement.  We will add parentheses around each concept to make it easier to see and organize them, and then we will add ANDs between concepts to tell Google to look for words from all of the concepts. 


Here is our completed Google search statement: 

(“illegal immigration” OR “illegal aliens” OR “undocumented workers”) AND (economy) AND (U.S. OR “United States” OR American)

(Click on the above search statement to see the search results in Google.)


Two effective ways to limit Google searches

 

In addition to organizing your Google searches into concepts using ORs and ANDs, you can limit your Google searches in two ways that can help you get better quality results:

·         By searching for pages just from certain domains, such as .edu, .org or .gov, you can focus on those types of pages that are more likely to have reliable, good quality web sites.

·         By looking for your search words only in the titles of pages rather than anywhere in the text or any other part of pages, you will have a better chance of finding pages in which your key words are a very important focus of the pages.

 

site:

 

To limit your search to a specific domain, use the Google command: site: followed by the type of domain you want your results to be from.  For example:   
site:.edu

will limit the search to just pages from .edu sites.

IMPORTANT:  DO NOT type a space before or after the colon (:)
 

For example, to limit our previous search to just pages from .edu sites, we can use the following search:

(“illegal immigration” OR “illegal aliens” OR “undocumented workers”) AND (economy) AND (U.S. OR “United States” OR American) site:.edu

(Click on the above search statement to see the search results in Google.)

 

allintitle:

 

To look for your search words only in the titles of pages, use the Google command: allintitle: in front of the search words that you want Google to look for only in the title of web pages.

IMPORTANT:  DO NOT type a space before or after allintitle:

 

For example, to look for the words from our previous search only in the title of web pages, we can use the following search:

allintitle:(“illegal immigration” OR “illegal aliens” OR “undocumented workers”) AND (economy) AND (U.S. OR “United States” OR American)

(Click on the above search statement to see the search results in Google.)

 

Google Advanced Search

 

Google does have an Advanced Search mode which, like the PowerSearch and other article databases, includes multiple search boxes and various search limiters.  Unfortunately, however, Google’s Advanced Search mode is not set up for organizing a multiple concept search in the same way as can be done in the article databases.   Because Google’s Advanced Search mode is only set up for using ORs on one search line instead of on all search lines, you cannot organize your Advanced Search in exactly the same way as you organized your search worksheet. 

 

Google’s Advanced Search mode does provide some advantages, however, which are explained in a very good video tutorial that was created by Immaculata University’s Gabriele Library.  Please click on the link below and watch this tutorial.  You will need to have sound to hear the tutorial and a high speed Internet connection is required.  Also, be patient after you click on the link because the video will take a few moments to load before it begins to play. 

Google Advanced Searching Tutorial (4 min)

 

 

LSCI 100 Home

last revised: 11-11-08 by Eric Brenner, Skyline College, San Bruno, CA
These materials may be used for educational purposes if you inform and credit the author and cite the source as: LSCI 100: Introduction to Information Online Research. All commercial rights are reserved. To contact the author, send comments or suggestions to: Eric Brenner at brenner@smccd.edu