In Google Speed-Search Lesson #1, I showed you how to do phrase searches. In this lesson, we’ll look at basic Boolean, i.e. using uppercase AND and OR in our searches.
Let’s imagine you’re British and you want to find websites about Father Christmas, you might start with this:
Father Christmas
What you’re really telling Google is to search for any website that contains the words Father AND Christmas, not necessarily together, or even in that order. Fortunately, the results you get for this search just happen to have Father and Christmas together in the order you specified, such is the magic of Google’s ranking algorithms.Â
Using a phrase search
However, as good as Google is, it gave us over 10 million results, which is just a few more than most people are prepared to look through. Let’s do our search properly, using a phrase search:
"Father Christmas"
That’s better. This time Google gives us 1.5 million results, and we can be sure they all have an exact match for our phrase.
Don’t forget that Google’s Boolean default is AND, so if you search for
"Father Christmas" "Santa Claus"
you’re going to get results that match “Father Christmas” AND “Santa Claus”. Not surprisingly, there are only 318,000 results that match both of these names.
Using Boolean OR
It’s more likely that you want to search for websites that match either “Father Christmas” or “Santa Claus”, in which case you have to explicitly tell Google that by including the Boolean OR in your search:
"Father Christmas" OR "Santa Claus"
Perfect. Now every result contains one or the other jolly little man. Now consider the following search:
"World Cup" (soccer OR football)
If you prefer, you can replace the OR with a pipe character:
"World Cup" (soccer | football)
Remember that this means “Give me results that match the terms “World Cup” and also contain either soccer or football“.
A more complex example with phrase and Boolean searches
Here’s one last example to show you how specific you can be with just phrase and Boolean searches:
Japan "English teacher" "((Nick OR Nicholas) (Ramsay OR Ramsey))"
This means the results must contain one of the following:
Japan, English teacher, Nick RamsayJapan, English teacher, Nick RamseyJapan, English teacher, Nicholas RamsayJapan, English teacher, Nicholas Ramsey
Try experimenting with phrase searches and Boolean searches. See if you can find any long, lost friends!
Next: Google Speed-Search Lesson #3 – Negation
If you like, you can find me on Twitter at @nick_ramsay. I'd love to hear from you!