BEt you don’t know what this post is about.
Search strategies. It’s about how to search more effectively using boolean operators. And that’s not a person.
Let’s say you’re searching for black panthers, the animal, as in our school mascot. Ok?
So you type in black panther just like that, nothing special, and you get a gazillion results.
Well, if you’ll put black panther in quotation marks like this: “black panther” , you’ll cut your results down to a zillion.
When you type in black panther the search engine is looking for the word black and the word panther anywhere on that page/site. BUT, if you were to get smart and put ” ” around it, then the search engine says “ok, I gotta have panther right after the word black, I gotta have panther right after the word black,…” Hmmmm.
In your zillion results what you are seeing is alot of stuff on the black panther political party. Let’s take that out of the results. Type “black panther” -party
Yep. That’s a minus sign right in front of party and no, I didn’t forget to space in between. Do not space in between the - and the word party. That “should” take out the entries that include the word party which is going to toss most of the political party stuff.
You can do the same thing to eliminate other result topics you don’t need, but you’d only want to start eliminating things that are in bulk and that you dont’ want. If you’re getting only one political party site every 20 listings in your results, why bother taking them out? What a pain. But, if you’re seeing half your entries on every results page containing political party, now THAT I’d take out. That’s in the way. Minus them right out of there.
Try it sometime. You’ll be pleasantly surprised that it truly does work. Search engines generally have a help section somewhere and reading that will give you more tips on searching more productively.
Hope this helps someone out there,
librarian librarian