Waikato Information Skills Education

Keyword search tools: Boolean connectors, nesting and truncation.

A great advantage of keyword searching is the ability to combine more than one keyword in a search. To do this effectively, there are a number of techniques that need to be understood and used.

AND, OR, and NOT are the three connectors, known as Boolean operators, used to join two or more keywords, because computers cannot interpret natural language.

Nesting and truncation are techniques used to enhance keyword searching.