Phrases in search engines
A phrase is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as a combination of words used to express an idea, sentiment, or the like in an effective manner.
Boolean terms may help you to find relevant material using an Internet search engine but sometimes they are not very effective. Documents on the web are not carefully indexed like those in quality-controlled information resources. Sometimes it is more effective to search for a phrase. You can use quote marks to search for an exact phrase in Google and many other search engines. For example, by searching for "Treaty of Versailles" you search for the exact phrase 'Treaty of Versailles' rather than allowing the search engine to use implied Boolean operators.
Phrase searching is particularly useful if you think about the sentences or phrases that might appear in the document that you need. For example, if you want to know how many loaves are in a baker's dozen you could search for "baker's dozen". This will return a lot of pages containing the phrase 'baker's dozen' but those at the top of the list will not necessarily answer your question. Searching for the exact phrase "in a baker's dozen" will return a more precise list of pages.
NB: Searching for this phrase without the quotation marks returns the same results as a search for ' baker's dozen'. That is because Internet search engines ignore very common words such as 'in' and 'a' unless you include them either by using quotation marks (" ") or using the 'AND' operator.
This example demonstrates the value of planning your search.
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