Boolean logic is a term applied to research terms and search strings, to join words together in a logical way so that computers know what to look for; and in what order they should do so. In online research terms this can be a quick way to ensure your research time is spent properly.

But what is Boolean Logic and how can I use it to improve my search results?

Boolean Logic uses those words the search engines can't search for. These are called STOP words, and include: and / or / not / the / of / near / to

The only exception to this rule is where you search for a phrase and you've remembered to add the quotation marks around the phrase - for example "place names of England".

And the reason is simple. The search engines use these words to help you find what you are looking for as we will see in a minute.

If you open up your Internet browser just for a minute and go to your search engine of choice and type in a string of words you are interested in looking for, the machinery will automatically assume you mean AND. I want to find this term AND this term AND this term

Event Planning; Road Trip; Wedding Speeches; How to structure a research report (unless in quotation marks will return most results with the words structure AND research AND report first and if you are lucky the how to at the beginning.

Do you see what we mean.

event AND planning; road AND trip; homework AND assignment

You don't need to add the AND the machinery will do that for you.

But say for instance you want alternatives, you could type in the variations in multiple searches and cross reference them, but there is a quicker way. You use the OR command.

But remember it has to be typed in - in upper case letters or the machinery will ignore it.

Online OR Web OR Internet Research.

Typing it as online or web or internet research means the algorithm will ignore the or, and gives you results that have all the words in the results.

However, what happens if you are getting results you don't want. How do you remove the terms that do not apply to your research? One of the ways is to use the NOT command. But you don't use the word, you use the minus symbol.

• event planning -wedding
• tea parties -cup -children -kids -chimp

Once you begin to use some of the advanced search techniques applied by the online researchers you will begin to get better results. You can spend less time surfing and more time researching the topic, organising the results and completing your assignments.