3.6. Writing your queries – what rules ?

*In this tutorial, we will go through the rules we need to follow in order to write your requests. We will also illustrate the use of the different Boolean operators in concrete examples.

Where to write your queries?

In the simple or advanced search bar of a Search Engine (Smart Web)

On the menu:

• How to start well?
• Exact expressions
• AND
• OR
• NOT
• parentheses ( )
• Wildcards: *
• Joker character: ?
• Near Operator: “ “~N
• Target URLs: site:
• Rules applied without boolean

How to start well?

Enter your keywords in LOWERCASE and the Boolean operators (AND OR NOT) in UPPERCASE.

!It may be tempting to capitalise company names or acronyms, but that’s a mistake.

No pre-completion!
Some search engines translate your keywords, automatically add plural/singular form or words close enough to same roots (f.e. drive OR driver OR driving OR drives…).
This kind of mechanic can be practical in some cases, but in the context of professional monitoring, it very often generates noise.

Enter your keywords yourself and be sure that we will respect your request to the nearest character!

No unnecessary spaces before or after your search word

The special characters are not taken into account (&, %, @, etc.)
Ignore them or leave a space instead.

Exact expressions

An exact expression is made up of several words, such as Jean-Philippe or JP Morgan.

We will write them with quotes: “Jean-Philippe” and “JP Morgan”

!Only straight quotes are used “ “, not curved “ ” (English) or chevrons (French) « »

AND

Example: I want to find articles that mention Macron AND Trump at the same time.

This will be written: trump AND macron

Each article contains both expressions

OR

The OR is the Boolean corresponding to “either this or this”.

Example: I want to find articles that mention the expression “fin-tech” or “cleantech”, either one or the other, not necessarily both at the same time.

This will be written: fin tech OR cleantech

Reminder: OR, like AND and NOT, is always written in UPPERCASE.

*Tip: State your research question out loud. If you say “either that or that” it will give an OR in your query. If you say “this AND this”, it will be an AND.

• I want to see articles that talk about electric car AND battery: “electric car” AND battery
• I want to see articles that talk about either UAVs or drones: uav OR drones

The NOT

This Boolean operator allows you to block articles that contains*certain keywords* or certain combinations of words.

“Orange NOT juice” would allow for example to block the context of orange juice (and could therefore target more the colour or the French telecom operator)

Parentheses

The AND, OR and NOT are applied to keywords immediately to the right and left of the boolean operator.

For the OR, this does not require anything in particular. We can chain them endlessly: car OR cars OR vehicle OR vehicles, etc.

But if we decide to add an AND so that the article also mentions the batteries:

car OR cars OR vehicle OR vehicles AND battery OR batteries

The above query actually gives vehicles AND battery or car (alone) or cars or etc. An article could simply mention “cars” withtout referring to battery.

It is therefore preferable to group synonyms above in a parenthesis:

(car OR cars OR vehicle OR vehicles) AND (battery OR batteries)

As a result, each article will mention one of the expressions car/vehicles AND at the same time either battery or batteries

Following the same logic, if we wanted to block several keywords (see NOT in the previous point), we will not write NOT lithium NOT ion NOT “lithium-ion”.
We will instead write: (car OR cars OR vehicle OR vehicles) AND (battery OR batteries) NOT (lithium OR ion OR “lithium-ion”)

Wildcards: *

Wildcards * replace all possible character combinations.

Thus farm* will give farm, farms, farmer, farmers, farming, etc.
Another example, *tion will give: action, petition, addiction, etc.

!The * loses its boolean function when used between “quotes”, e.g. agriculture AND “chemical engr*”.

*Tips: Using the * to “save time” and having the plural/singular/*ing/*ed keywords is often a bad idea. The few seconds saved by not entering them manually are lost in calculation time when we launch our searches (slower to display the results).

The joker character “?”

The ? matches any single character.
Can be used several times within the same word: ?? replaces two characters. Ex. ca?? = ca*ll*, ca*rs*, ca*st*, etc.

Example: ca?? = call, cars, cast, etc.

Near Operator: “ “~N

Is written: “word1 word2 word3”~N
The N is a number representing the distance, in a number of words, authorised between the different expressions sought.

Ex. “sustainable agriculture fertiliser”~5
This will display articles that have these three words separated from each other by a maximum of five words.

• The order of the terms does not matter.
• This boolean works in the search bar and in advanced search.
• Your keywords will not be highlighted in blue. This will be the subject of an upcoming platform update.

The site operator:

The site: operator is used to search by URL or domain name.
It is used in the SEARCH search bar only, at the very beginning of the query.

Example
site:.fr will give you all the publications whose URL is a .fr
site:agriculture.numérique.fr will launch a search on this site (provided it is related to your)

Queries withtout using any boolean

What happens if I don’t use boolean?

Term1 term2 term3
Example: startup sustainable food

The algorithm will show you all the publications that mention one of these three words.

This could be interesting if you sort the results by “relevance”. Articles with all of your search words and in greater numbers and near each other will be displayed at the very top of the results, while articles poorer in your keywords are at the very bottom of last pages.

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