Using a search engine is a pretty important skill to have these days. So much so that this should probably be a core requirement in high school and college these days.
Google has a page devoted to their advanced search operators. But there are a few that I use most often, and these are the most important to know.
The “minus” operator—which excludes results that have the word after the minus character—is useful when there are several different domains that use a particular keyword. For example Apple was using big cat species for it’s operating system versions, so a search of snow leopard -apple -mac helped narrow the results down to just pages about the animal.
Google presumes an AND between search terms. But if you want to use OR, the AND clarifies the specific Boolean logic you want. For example, I have several Google Alerts set up for news about particular species, and this is the general template I use:
giraffe AND (conservation OR endangered OR threatened OR poached OR bushmeat)
Finally, you can put a phrase in quotes to get even more specific. This is especially when each of the the terms separately are generic. That said, Google has been getting better and better about surmising what you mean, so"African wild dog" doesn’t even need to be in quotes to get to the same set of results.
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