[blindLaw] Slightly offtopic: question about boolean searches

[Rahul Bajaj]

Hi all,

Since this list consists of highly sophisticated legal practitioners, I thought it would be prudent to ask this question here. I use two main strategies to conduct online advanced searches on Google:
A. Putting the search phrases in quotation marks, without separating them with any word or punctuation mark in between. There is only a space in between.
B. Using capitalized ‘AND” and “OR” between search terms. When I deploy this second approach, I do not surround the search terms with brackets or anything else.

Now, I believe a better way to search without quotation marks is by surrounding the search terms in brackets. However, I don’t quite understand how this works, and what advantage it has over searching for terms without brackets, but while separating them with “AND” and “OR”. Can someone please explain this?

Second, how can I actually exclude some terms from search results on Google? Using a capitalized “NOT” before the word does not achieve this. Thank you.

Rahul
 

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