Types of Search

Frederic Talis
Sitiphanus Masantun
Constantine Duncan Joumy
 Boolean Logic Search
• Booleans are simple terms that can be added
to your search words to make the results more
flexible or specific
• Using Boolean terms in your search will also
greatly increase the accuracy of your queries
• Familiarizing yourself with the logic of these
Boolean searches will help you get better
• results
 Boolean Term: AND
• The Boolean
expression AND
narrows your search.
• This is the default
when you search for
more than one word.
 Boolean Term: OR

• The Boolean
expression OR
broadens your
search.
 Boolean Term: NOT
• The word
following NOT
must not
appear in a
document for
the search
engine to
return it.
 Boolean Term: ( ) (parentheses)
• Terms can be grouped together
with parentheses.
• A search for project AND
(manager OR supervisor) will
return any document
mentioning project manager or
project supervisor.
• Searching for (project AND
manager) OR supervisor will
bring results with project
manager or the term supervisor
alone.
 Boolean Term: Quotation Marks: " "

• Enclose specific phrases in quotation marks.

• This will direct the search engine to search the
database for documents containing that exact
phrase.
 Boolean Term: *
(the asterisk wildcard)
• As the name implies, * can be substituted for
any amount of letters.
• This is particularly useful to include all words
with a certain term and any suffix after it.
• For example: biostatistic* will find
biostatistician or biostatistics or biostatistical
 Truncation Search
• Truncation search enables to retrieve in one
search all terms beginning with the same
character string.
• For example, truncating a search term allows
you to retrieve singular or plural forms of a
word and different spellings of a word or
name.
• There is no truncation symbol in the system.
 Performing Truncation Search
• Click on “Search Type” to select the field to conduct a
truncation search among title, author, publisher,
subject and all.
• In “Search Term” type any keyword.
– Example: Search
• In the proceeding example, you retrieve all records
that contains words beginning with
• the character string s-e-a-r-c-h. For example, you
retrieve records contain the words search, searches,
searching, searcher, and searchers.
 Performing Truncation Search
Set Search Limits
• You may limit your search result by several
qualifiers. Searches can be narrowed, for
example, to an individual library by selecting a
library from the available selections under
options.
• In order to restrict a search, specify “Search
Limits” before you search by type of material
or medium and date (publication year).
 Performing Truncation Search
Set Display Format
• Before conduct a search, display format may
be defined.
• Click the “Max. No. Items/Page” to select the
number of records to display per page.
• Click the “Max. No. of Result Items” to select
the number of records to retrieve.
• Click the “Search” button to begin.
 Search within search
• Allow users to search from within search
results.
• As databases grow the necessity for the user
to continually narrow a search to the item that
they truly want will grow also.
• Searching within the current results will take
the first search and add it to the new search
and so on.