Narrows the search by requiring all search terms to be found in the results. OR Broadens the search by requiring at least one of the search terms to be found in the results. Useful when searching for synonyms. Phrase Searching Requires the terms to appear in the exact order that they are typed. Most systems that allow phrase searching have the user enter the phrase in quotes.
Search engines rank results differently.
Many rely on a frequency count of the search terms, i.d., those documents in which the search term appears many times will rank higher than those documents with fewer occurrences of the term. Some search engines combine frequency with location, i.e., if the search term appears in the title or header of the document it is ranked higher. If truncation is not supported by the search engine use the boolean operator OR to combine like terms. The results from an online database search may, at times, yield too few or too many citations or documents. Delete less specific synonyms and ambiguous terms Search fewer fields e.g., just the title field or URL Add additional facets with AND or NOT Add restrictions, e.g., date of publication Subject Directories Subject directories index Web sites by providing a list of subject categories.