searching for information

Quick but effective searching

Choose the relevant keywords or search terms from the assessment question

Use AND to combine all the relevant keywords when searching (explained further in Boolean Logic)

Use synonyms or alternative versions of the keywords to make sure your search has not been limited

Boolean Logic

• if you use more than one keyword most search engines and catalogues will automatically assume AND eg if you type in cat dog and they will search for cat AND dog – unless it specifically says it is a browse search, and then it will search alphabetically
• OR can come in handy when there is more than one spelling e.g. color OR colour, globalisation OR globalization
• NOT comes in handy if you are after one particular term not in relation to another e.g. chocolate NOT cake

• If you are searching for a phrase use quotation marks “Eveleigh railway”
• If you are unsure of exact spelling, or want different tenses (waiting, waited, etc) from your search using an asterisk (*) allows for different endings to words e.g. run* will find any word that begins with “run” including run, runner, running. However, this is better with longer words, as run* could bring back runway, runabout, runny, rung and many more. The more specific you can be, the more relevant the results will be, e.g. globali* will return less possible word combinations than run* (although in some search engines they symbol used is not an asterisk – if an asterisk does not work, check the help file to see if a different symbol is used)
• In some search engines you can specify the type of site you want results retrieved from. You can either go into advanced search, or you can just type site: and then the suffix of the sites you would like to retrieve eg. site:.edu.au will only return pages of Australian educational institutes or site:.gov.au will only return pages from Australian government sites
• Library catalogues do not include “the” or “a” in their browse search so if you are looking for A Midsummer Night’s Dream and you do a browse search you would drop the “a” and search for “midsummer night’s dream”