Improve Your Results with Advanced Search

If you want to add precision to your searches, you can use a variety of special operators right in the search box. Here are four of the more useful ones.

Advanced Search Options to Explore Using

Exact Phrase, e.g., "to be or not to be" finds only the words in quotes in the order in which they appear. This type of search is great for titles you know, author names, or if you know documents contain a specific phrase, like "idea engagement.".

Exclude Specific Words, e.g. cow -mad. You may know these as "not" searches. Adding a hyphen before a word is telling PowerSearch to exclude it from the search. In this example, documents returned will have the word cow but not mad. In this way the search eliminates mad cow disease references. These "not" searches can be very useful, especially when regular words, like engagement, are used as a research term. Putting together a search like engagement -ring will return results that concern the advertising concept of engagement, not an engagement ring.

Words Near One Another, e.g., stock NEAR exchange. The word NEAR tells PowerSearch to look for the search terms within 15 words of each other. NEAR is always used in uppercase. This type of search avoids the problem of documents returned that have the words in them, but very far apart and less relevant to the search.

And, Or, e.g., idea AND engagement returns documents that include these words anywhere in the document. The "and" operator is PowerSearch's default search; there is really no need to specify it. OR searches are a way to expand the search. idea OR engagement will return any document with the word idea or engagement anywhere within them. By themselves, OR searcheas tend to return lower quality results. Professional searchers use AND and OR in combination to make searching more efficient and place them in parentheses to control them, e.g. (idea engagement) AND (brand OR television) will return results that include the terms idea-engagement-brand in documents along with idea-engagement-television. This type of boolean searching is very powerful. AND and OR are always used in uppercase in PowerSearch.