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By using Boolean Operators and different search techniques, we can build a search statement.
Search statements are not research question. Instead, they are statements created by using
keywords and phrases from your research question. In addition, the way a search statement will
look will be different according to what tool you are using.
For example, let's say that I am research the question: How have cats affected the way
that we use the internet? The first thing I am going to want to do is
take out all the unnecessary words and focus on the keywords. In this case I am left with
cats AND internet Next I take my keywords and go to Academic
Search Premier. In Academic Search Premier I type in cat* AND internet Please remember
that the start symbol is used to find multiple endings of a word. I get over twenty-two thousand
five hundred results! However, if I look over these results I notice that most of them have
nothing to do with my topic. In this case I am going to add in synonyms or related words
to try and get better search results. In this case I add in the word kitten so now
my search reads (cat* OR Kitten*) And internet. This time I get more results, the results
up toward the top look a lot more relevant to my research topic. I still have too many
results. So in this case I am going to narrow my search down to just look for information
on Cat Videos on the internet. I can do this by changing the single word internet to "internet
videos". Doing this further narrows down my search results to 146. This is the perfect
number of results to look at on Academic Search Premier.
Now lets search on Google. Google doesn't use search operators quite the same as Academic
Search Premier. For example the only Boolean operator it uses is OR. It automatically will
put AND in between all your search statements. So if I wanted to do the same search in google
I would type in "cat* OR kitten*" "internet video" This will give me over 3 million results,
however, in general google will organize the most relevant results to be first. You could
also type in cat videos on google, this will bring up completely different results. However,
it will give you lots of examples concerning cat videos.
In contrast to google, Bing does use Boolean operators so if you want to search for information
on cat videos on Bing, you can use the same search that you would use for academic search
premier. There are lots of different search tools on
the internet. So keep in mind that you will often want to look at the help material for
the search tool before you start using it. Also remember that there is not one single
way to perform a search so be creative, make mistakes, and find more information on cat
videos! If you want more information on how to find
cat videos or information on cat videos or anything else. Please feel free to contact
us here at the Stewart Library reference desk. You can contact us by visiting library.weber.edu
and then click on the ask a librarian link in the top corner of the page. And as always,
thanks for watching.