Why Use “+” and Other Boolean Operators When Searching the Internet?

When using certain search engines to find websites that are relevant to a particular topic, it can be quite annoying to find that many of the search results are not all related to the key phrases or key words that you entered. What’s even more annoying is that you visit those webpages, you will find out that these are just pages that contain mostly advertisements for certain products that are not even related to your search.

To reduce the time that you spend going though irrelevant search results, you can refine your search by using Boolean operators such as “+” and “-.”

* Use “+” to “tell” the search site that the words must be included in the search results.

Affix the “+” sign before every word that must be present in the pages that will appear in the search results. For example, if you would like all of the search results to have the term “review,” then type “+review” at the search bar to instruct the search engine to ignore results that do not mention the term. This is help you get rid of irrelevant pages that contain advertisements for products that you have no interest in. (more…)