Operators

operator at a switch board.

Why use operators?

Operators help to refine your search terms to get better results by enabling you to expand, narrow, or focus your query.

What do operators do?

Basic operators may instruct the search engine to include all terms in a search dolphins AND football or exclude a term dolphins -football from documents retrieved.

Basic operators can also unite individual terms into a unique phrase that must appear exactly as written in a retrieved document, "George Washington professional football".

What are basic operators?

Operators are usually symbols (like +, - or " " ) or words (AND, OR, NOT) that change the way search engines interpret query terms. 

Chart of Boolean operators

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Authored by Lora K. Kaisler and Dennis O'Connor