Module 4 – Searching the web question 3

Ok I as a university student and a Youtube +Wikipedia addict use boolean searches everyday but I never knew about the OR function of search engines which should come in handy sometime in the future. Just cannot think of a use for it now

If I just search for Poseidon on Google it will yield 13.3 million hits.

Ok now time to refine this number.

I know I want information about the mythological character Poseidon and I know their are companies out there so I will type the following into Google.

poseidon -company -business (since a company is a form of business).

The resulting number of hits yields 8.02 million hits a major improvement but still a very large number unwelcome in search results, welcome number in the bank account.

I can see Poseidon is a film that was developed in 2006 so let us edit out the search criterion film from this search. We will now type the following into Google noting that alternative references to film are also included as I dont think they had the word DVD some three thousand years ago although Apollo would know about it.

The search criteria now is:

poseidon -company -business -film -dvd -vhs -dvd -movie -cinema

Much can be improved on the 6.5 million hits, indications are of the Poseidon weather system I also know from experience that Poseidon is also a community developed freeware JAVA SAD application so we will also exclude from the search criterion Java and weather system.

poseidon -company -business -film -dvd -vhs -dvd -movie -cinema -java -sad -”weather system” -rad -”case tool” -freeware -software

The result is now 5.66 million hits notice the “” in the above search keywords that tells the search engine only results containing within quotation marks ” “. Necessary as removing anything containing weather may result in the loss of actual links we are looking for since as the power responsible for the sea in ancient times Poseidon would have had partial if not total control of the weather over the sea.

We can also force quality links to appear first which in this case is necessary as the keyword poseidon is very popular in modern society in this case we do not care about the number of hits but only the first page of links displayed. Google will display reference to Wikipedia first when researching mythological characters, assuming this wasnt the case.

The search criteria to get the best results on the first page would be using the AND function which is achieved with the + symbol.

Enter this into your choice of search engine:

poseidon +myth +sea +deity

With only 3 additional keywords we get the first page full of links to the subject we are actually interested in. The number of hits is 32.4 thousand which in translation to pure English would be similiar to

Find results on poseidon that also include the keyword myth and also the keyword sea and also the keyword deity.

This is by far a more efficient way of searching the web for such a popular subject.

However if you just wanted a very basic encylopedia definition of a keyword with links then we can use the Google define function which for the word Poseidon would be typed exactly like this into Google:

define: poseidon

This results in 14 encyclopedia definitions with links to them if you do not know what a word means or your looking for a very basic description then the define function is what your looking for.

We can also combine boolean expressions take for example

Ares -program -p2p +war OR battle

This when translated in English is effectively telling your search engine of choice:

Search for Ares exlude matches that have the word program and exclude matches that have the word p2p include matches that have the word war and the word battle.

We know that Ares is also the name for a p2p application obviously knowing some basic knowledge on your keyword will lead to more efficient time wise harvesting of information.