Through our WorldCat catalog you can search for books, ebooks, journal articles and even our various media. The following will discuss basic techniques that work with just about any search engine you are familiar with (including Google, Bing, Yahoo or DuckDuckGo).
Keyword Search
This is what most people are familiar with. This is what we do daily when we type something into the Google search box. It basically is a method of searching based on a few points of contact. This works best if you know the author or title of a work. This also works, to an extent, if you are looking for a subject. The keywords that you can use can be: words from the title, descriptive terms related to your topic, the author's name, the format or language of publication, the year of publication, or even the title of a journal.
To improve the accuracy of a Keyword search we often want an exact phrase. A Phrase Search is the exact phrase in the order that you want it, but put into quotation marks. This will return only results that are exactly what you typed into the quotation marks.
Boolean Search
This is a way of constructing a search query (fancy term for what we enter into the search boxes) that adds precision. If you want all the words in your query present, then type AND (in all caps) between each word. AND can be replaced with the plus sign (+) if you wish. OR (in all caps) will search of either word in the query. NOT (again in all caps) will exclude the word after NOT. NOT can be replaced with the minus sign (-).
[hint: AND makes your results list smaller while OR makes the results list larger]
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