Search Engine Tips

A visitor to the site recently searched for the following

“control OR system OR health OR care OR new OR research OR high OR science OR product”

Now anyone who has used any search engine successfully will spot the fatal flaw in such a search. I’ve no idea whether the person was looking for control, system, health, care, new, research, high, science, product, or what.

I suspect what they were after was information on scientific research into healthcare control system products. But, I could be mistaken. If I’m right though, then the search string they should have used would be something like this:

“scientific research” “healthcare control system” products

To be strict and depending on the search engine they might have used the Boolean “AND” (Certainly not the “OR”) to make their search tighter:

“scientific research” AND “healthcare control system” AND products

There are lots of variations one might use, Google prefers a + sign for terms that really, really must be used in the search so that even noise words can be included

+”scientific research” +”healthcare control system” +products

The only trouble with using the term products is it’s more likely to take you to consumer type sites rather than scientific research sites, much better to search for such things on techxtra, intute, googlescholar etc using David Bradley’s science search box available from Sciencebase or on sites such as IRN (It’s below the “fold” on the left hand side).

For more advice on how to construct a useful search string for the main search engines try here (It is an old page, but just as valid today as it was in October 2001, logic is logic after all. Logically.)