DAY 4 of EIR

I learn something very interesting today. It is call the boolean operator. It may seem very simple, but it is effective for research purposes. Many a times, when we are doing research, we do not know what word to put into the search engine (super singlish, but this isn't important). And these could cause many irrelevant search results which we do not want. But by using boolean operator, we can place the correct keywords to get a more relevant search result.

So... what is boolean operator?

Basically
Boolean searches allow you to combine words and phrases using the words AND, OR, NOT and NEAR (otherwise known as Boolean operators) to limit, widen, or define your search. Most Internet search engines and Web directories default to these Boolean search parameters anyway, but a good Web searcher should know how to use basic Boolean operators.

(Extracted from http://websearch.about.com/od/2/g/boolean.htm)

For example, My topic is ""Discuss the role of the architectural industry in the global go-green movement".
From there, i extracted out the keywords, "Role, architecture,design, global and green movement". I came out with a table like this(below)

From this table, i came out with the sentence, "(Role*) AND (Architecture*) AND (Design* OR Create*) AND (Global*) AND (Green movement OR Sustain*).

And the sentence is used in the search engine. Try it, it is easy to do and very effective.

One new search tool that i have learnt which i find it very useful is Metacrawler. It looks like a normal engine but the results are really incredible. These crawlers searches result from many different search engines like yahoo and google, and compiled it in pages . It is definitely a very effective research tool. You may want to try using it. Visit http://www.metacrawler.com/ .

( hope you guys learn something)