Boolean Strings Basics & Beyond

The live presentations have concluded, but the recordings, slides, and supplemental materials are still available for purchase.

 
This foundational class teaches you how to search effectively online. It is a resource for new Sourcers and a way for experienced Sourcers and Recruiters to refresh their search skills.

In addition to basic Boolean rules, modern search engines provide many powerful features that can help you find information more quickly and precisely than ever before.

We explain the main concepts, best practices, and techniques for finding professionals online (with any skill set, location, or industry) and how to create the best search strings from the ground up on Google.

Substantial new material explains how to defeat the endless scrolling, what we learned about the two categories of queries from Google Engineers, how Google scores against ChatGPT, and more.

Part 1 Outline

• All Search is Boolean
• Terminology
• Google Strings vs Boolean Strings
• Internet Search vs "Database" Search
• The Main Search Principle
• Search for What You Expect to Find
• What You Expect To Find
• Results Revealed
• How Google Works
• Viewing Cached (Saved to Index) Results
• Cached Result vs. Live
• Your Location
• Advanced Search Dialog
• The Silent AND
• What ORs Do on Google
• Best Practices: Don’t Use OR on Google
• Boolean Logic – NOT
• - (Minus) Example: Excluding Unwanted Results
• Best Practices: Try To Avoid Using - (NOT)
• Capitalization Doesn't Matter
• Punctuation (Mostly) Doesn't Matter
• Word Order Matters
• Change Word Order to Expand Results
• Repeating Keywords Changes Results
• Google's Semantic Features
• Semantic Search Example
• Control the Interpretation -
• Search for a Word Exactly
• Words in Quotation Marks Will Appear in Snippets Bolded
• Google – Quotation Marks
• Compare Different Placement of Quotes
• Quotes in ORs
• Simple Boolean Strings
• Complex Boolean Strings
• "Open-Ended" vs. "Restrictive" Search on Google
• Restrictive Search
• Open-Ended vs. Restrictive
• Restrictive Search
• From Open-Ended to Restrictive
• Captchas
• Rule of Three
• Searching for Contact Lists with the Rule of Three

Day 2 Outline

• Special Characters and Symbols
• Emojis
• Asterisk *
• Numrange ..
• Main Google Operators
• site: (Recruiters call it X-ray)
• site: Examples
• X-Ray Social Sites for Member Profiles
• X-Ray LinkedIn for Job Titles & Companies
• Benefits of Repeating Keywords in X-Ray
• Operators before: and after:
• AROUND(X)
• Operator Placement Does Not Affect Results
• Boolean Strings Combining Operators
• The Full List of Google Operators
• Google for Research
• Gather Intelligence via Google Job Search
• Google Maps Search
• Google Events Search
• Collect Lists of Companies or Schools
• Collecting Lists
• Multi-Page Lists
• Google for Candidates
• Unrolling the Scrolling
• Free Tool - Google Results Scraper
• Internet Search vs AI Research
• Example - Bing vs Bing chat
• Example - Google vs Bard