Monday, 1 July 2013

Search Strategies Basics ( Transactions and Wildcard & Phrase Searching)

Transactions and Wildcard

This week was spent on learning the usage of truncation and wildcard. These two help to broaden our search capabilities by allowing us to retrieve multiple spellings of a root word, such as singular and plural forms.
Truncation: Using a wildcard at the end of a word to search for multiple results.  It expands the search to locate all words beginning with the same root. Example: Teen* will give teen, teens, teenage, teenager, etc.
Wildcard:  A wildcard is a special character, such as an asterisk (*), question mark (?), or pound sign (#), that replaces one or more letters in a word. It usually represents a single character. Example: wom?n will give woman, women, etc.

Phrase Searching

This type of search is used with a string of words(instead of a single word) to search with. It will yield fewer results. When looking for information on Information Literacy the result of the search will yield many irrelevant documents since each of the words has its own meaning. But it has whole different meaning when put together so to be precise we either use "  " or (  ). Example: (Information Literacy).

It's use has proven very effective and time-saving. This subject is certainly a must for the people of the information age. 

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