BOOLEAN BASICSBoolean is the art of building a search string. Search strings are the word combinations entered by users into a search engine or directory to locate needed information. It helps organize these search strings and target results. Thorough understanding and proper utilization of basic search criteria is absolutely essential to the building of effective search strings. Miss a space, omit one quotation mark, misspell a single word, and the entire search falls apart. It may be easier at first to form your search string in a Word document, then copy and paste it into the Google search box. This enables you to view the string in its entirety and check it for accuracy. Phrase search (" ") Putting double quotes around a set of words tells Google to consider the exact words in that exact order. The searches “quality manager” and “quality control manager”, for example, will produce two totally different search results. The OR Operator Google's default behavior is to consider all the words in a search. A space in the string is the equivalent to saying “and”. If you want to specifically allow either one of several words, use the OR operator. The OR qualifier must be in a parenthetical list and typed in capital letters. A search string including both Quality Manager and Quality Control Manager would look like this: (“quality control manager” OR “quality manager”) Exclude Terms (-) Attaching a minus sign immediately before a word indicates that you do not want that word to appear in your results. The minus sign should appear immediately before the word and should be preceded by a space. Inurl URL stands for “Uniform Resource Locator”. It is the address of a resource, file, site, service, etc. on the internet, and it is located at the bottom of each matched result. The inurl search syntax allows you to search for words within the URL. To find URLs that contain the word “manufacturing”, enter inurl:manufacturing in Google’s search box. Intitle The Title operator is used to search websites only within the title tags, or the actual page title as defined by the website’s author. The title is found at the top of each matched result. To find all titles containing the word "manufacturing" (Fig. 1-F), enter intitle:manufacturing in Google’s search box. Detailed use of Boolean can be found starting on page one of, Using Free Internet Networks to Find Local Candidates, A Recruiter's Guide. Further information on Boolean can be found on Google's Web Search page. Google Web Search
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