Module 4 - Boolean Search Task

Taking the same key words 'advanced internet users' as your last search, think about how you would best search for the following:

• The biggest number of hits relating to these key words

To return the biggest number of hits I used OR as my Boolean operator. I used this to search on Google and it returned a massive 2,650,000,000 hits. Using the Boolean operator of AND, Google returned 263,000,000.

• Sources relating to skills-based information on these key words.

For this I used Metacrawler and Advanced OR Internet OR Users OR Skills, this returned 96 hits, to be honest I was not sure whether to use AND or OR for this exercise, so I did both! Using AND as a Boolean operator Metacrawler returned 99 hits. Most of the web sites were the same for both methods.

• Information coming only from university sources

I used Metacrawler again, but I went into the advanced search preferences and specified that I only wanted to search for sites with the domain of .edu, this returned 19 hits which seem to be relevant to university sources only.