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It’s an old story. You’ve got a tight deadline and you need specific information right away.

So you rush to the Internet, type in a few words… and get over 15 million hits. So much for that tight deadline.

There is, however, a better way.

What you need is to make use of a form of logic developed by 17th century mathematician George Boole. Today, his Boolean logic is an integral part of many search engines and it can help you search faster and smarter.

Here’s how it works.

Boolean logic uses the following operators (always capitalised): AND, OR, and NOT. Some search engines use AND NOT as a variant.

Each can specifically focus your search, enabling you to easily expand, narrow or remove what is considered within the search.

But what does this really mean? Lets take a closer look.

AND is the most common operator and ensures a word is included. For example, search for the following terms:

business AND advantage

Each result should contain the words ‘business’ and ‘advantage’ and you won’t receive irrelevant hits that contain only one of each word.

This is especially important if one (or more) of the words is very generic or broad. Type in a word like ‘language’ and you’ll see what that means!

It’s also important to note that for many search engines, such as Google and Alta Vista, the operator AND is assumed by default and you won’t need to enter it.

OR broadens your search, which means you can look for alternative words.

As such, if you search for ‘business’ OR ‘advantage’, all sites containing the word business will be displayed, as will all pages containing the word advantage.

While this undoubtedly returns more results, you can narrow your search further by including other similar or related words. For example:

business OR work OR office

NOT makes sure a keyword isn’t included, which means you can narrow your results.

By searching for ‘business’ NOT ‘advantage’, the word business will be included in all results, however, all sites with the word ‘advantage’ aren’t included.

You can even make use of a few more helpful options to make the most of your Boolean searching:

(Nested Searching)

Within most major search engines it’s also possible to create more complex queries using Boolean operators, parentheses and phrases. Termed nested searching, this ensures you can drill down into very refined detail.

For example: Business AND (notebook OR mobile workstation)

Usually, the words contained within the parentheses are searched first.

“Quotations”

By using quotations you can ensure a phrase is searched in the exact order it is typed.

“business notebook for small office”

“business notebook” OR “mobile workstation”

+ (plus) and - (minus)

One of the most simple search methods is to include a phrase and then use the plus and minus symbols to remove specific words.

“business notebook” +wireless –expensive

It’s good to note that in general, most search Web sites have ’advanced search’ features. It’s worth looking at them and finding out their exact requirements.

And as you can see, with just a little Boolean logic, you can find what you’re looking for.