Google Search Tip: The Case for Upper Case

“If you can't ignore an insult, top it; if you can't top it, laugh it off; and if you can't laugh it off, it's probably deserved.” -- J. Russell Lynes (American Writer, b.1910)

GOOGLE SEARCH® TIP: OR vs. or

Something I learned by accident provides today’s Google® search tip: pay attention to CASE.

If you search Google® Scholar as much as I do, you probably blow past the advanced search form and start entering Boolean search strings directly into the search box.

If you do, know this … CASE matters.  Take a simple search for documents containing either dibenzothiophene or desulfurization.

Typing in the search string …

dibenzothiophene OR desulfurization

yields almost 65,000 hits.

Conversely, typing in the search string …

dibenzothiophene or desulfurization

yields less than one tenth (1/10^th) that.

Google ignores the lower case “or” and treats the remaining words as an AND statement

These two screen shots illustrate the point.

 

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