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Refining Searches - Exercise

Perform a search with advanced operators

Objective:Use advanced search query operators to refine a search query and limit the results

Scoring

This exercise is an opportunity for you to check your understanding of the material covered in the preceding lesson. When you are finished, click the Submit button to view the suggested results.

Background/overview

The require/exclude operators discussed in the lesson are the most restrictive yet. At the same time, the wildcard operator allows query expansions such as name searching with just the first few letters or all forms of a word. Phrase searching allows for such searches as quotations and multi-part names to be performed easily.

Instructions


The results of the last exercise mentioned that using Boolean operators and grouping could be cumbersome. This time, use the advanced operators of this lesson to search again for Jean Shepherd the radio humorist and storyteller, not the country singer.
If you would like to try a different search, try this one. The cultured milk product known in the United States as yogurt has other spellings, like yoghurt. Compose a search that will match either spelling and will not return unwanted results with the same root spelling. If you cannot guess at the unwanted results to exclude, you may want to perform the search once to see which ones they are.
For this exercise, use these two search engines:
  1. ask.com
  2. dogpile.com