Boolean Search

Search Keys	Purpose of limiter	What did you find when you tried it? How many hits? Was this limiter effective?
AND	Narrows down your search by only showing things that contain both phrases on either side of the and	When searching Norwegian and knitting: 2,980,000 results were found on Google on a wide variety of topics.
OR	Broadens your search results by showing things that contain phrases on either side of the or	When searching Norwegian or knitting: Same results as using and
NOT	Narrows down your search by eliminating things from your search that contain the phrase after not	When searching Norwegian knitting not patterns: 2,930,000 results were found although many still contained patterns
“ “	Tells the search engine what words constitute the phrase being acted on	When searching “Norwegian knitting” not pattern: however, adding the “” around Norwegian knitting reduced the results to 50,300 results which was significant
*	This is the wildcard. It is added to words in places where letters may vary but you want to search for all forms of the word	When searching “Norwegian knitting” not pattern*: Adding the * to the end of pattern actually increased the results to 194,000
- (minus)	The same as not	When searching "Norwegian knitting" -pattern*: the results were slightly different with 154,000 results
+ (plus)	The same as and	When searching Norwegian+knitting, the results were the same as using and
5 Others You’ve Found
Near	Similar to and but the words must be found within a certain space of each other	Using near also yielded the same results as using and
:.org	Put this after your search term to retrieve results that only come from .org websites	Using this filter left 1,240,000 sites.
Zip code	Type your 5 digit zip code in after the search phrase to get results limited to your location in Google	Searching knitting 99801 yielded 144,000 results for knitting in Juneau
~	Place this immediately in front of the word you are searching to find synonyms	Using the ~ before patterns in Norwegian knitting patterns caused the results to jump from 179,000 to1,180,000
:.gov	Narrows your search to only websites ending in .gov	Searching for Norway:.gov yielded a variety of government information on the country.