Do you know how to search? Can you find what you’re looking for on Google? Do you just Bing it when you need an answer? I suspect you’ve got the basics down but did you know there’s a simple way to refine your search and get better answers?
Three simple words will change your life:
- OR
- AND
- NOT
Ok, maybe Boolean searches won’t change your life but they will certainly help you find what you’re really looking for. In social media, these can help hone your efforts to monitor your brand and your keywords.
Searches that use the OR command allow you to look for several different but related search terms at the same time. The results will show all web page that mention one or more of your search terms. For the upcoming Social Media Camp Victoria event, blogs, tweets and status updates will use the name of the conference (Social Media Camp), the conference’s hashtag (#SMCV11) or the conference Twitter name (@YYJSocialMedia). To find a broad cross section of content related to the conference I’ll probably monitor this search:
Alternatively, searches that use AND command will be limited to only those web pages that include all the search terms.
Note that the OR search returned 577,700 results while the AND search came up with 1,320 results. You’ll decide if you want lots of information or a very focused result.
Finally, the NOT command can be used to include one search time while excluding another. For example, maybe you want to do a search for birds but exclude the pages that also mention cats. NOT is a very useful tool to filter out distracting search results.
Also, note how I’ve put quotation marks around the search for “Social Media Camp”. Quotes are important to ensure that your search results include the entire phrase. You can use quotes in any search – simple search or Boolean search.