For example, if I type in basketball NC chapel hill on the search line, the engine will return anything it finds about basketball, North Carolina, chapel and hill. So you can see I am not going to get what I was looking for. Now the search engine will look for the whole string Chapel Hill and not chapel and hill separately. This has the effect of limiting or expanding the search results. These are referred to as Boolean operators.
Some search engines allow the use of wild cards.
A wild card is a character which can be appended to the root of a word so that you can search for all possible endings. For instance, you may be looking for information on the harmful effects of smoking. Try it now. Go to each search engine and enter a word that has more than one possible ending. Then search again using the root of the word plus a wild card.