Important considerations for evaluating information sources include:
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Go to the Search Engines Page
Boolean searching connects two (or more) search terms together with operators. The most common operators are AND, OR, and NOT. AND narrows a search by requiring that the result include both terms:
Shakespeare AND Bacon
(You are doing a paper on the theory that Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays and you want to find documents about Shakespeare that contain the word, "Bacon.")
Santorini OR Thera
(You want information about the Mediterranean island of Santorini, formerly known as Thera. Your search will find it under either name)
"da Vinci" NOT code
(Your search is about the artist Leonardo, not the novel/film/cultural phenomenon.)
A search word or combination of words connected with operators is called a query. The rules, or syntax, for forming a query vary from one search engine to another. Virtually all have a link to "Help," or "Search Tips," which will tell you what the rules are, and what options are available to you. Some search engines have only a few simple ways to search. Others are very powerful and allow complicated queries with all kinds of special operators, truncation, and special searches. Examples of powerful search engines are Alta Vista (www.altavista.com) and HotBot (www.hotbot.com).
You may be required to use special characters, such as "&" for "and." Sometimes, you can use a truncation character to signify any ending to a word, for example, "educat*" for "educate," "education," "educational," educating," "educator," and so on. It is important to know what the rules are for each particular search engine, but some rules of thumb are: