Module 4 Tasks - Boolean

I found that when i tried searching "cats NOT dogs" in google it returned result for the word "not" and "dogs". This supprised me because the Boolean website said you just have to type NOT. I went into advanced search in Google and typed dogs in the 'words to exclude' section and my new search was "cat -dogs". So instead of writing NOT i just need to put a minus symbol. And it worked well!

When searching for "cats" i had 181,000,000 hits! When i searched for "cats -dogs" i had 81,400,000. Less than half!

When i tried searching for Surfing Portugal i recieved 363,00 hits. So then i put "surfing portugal" in inverted commas and returned 29,900 hits.

Then i tried Surfing AND portugal and returned 2,630,000. This suprised me because i thought that there would be less results when both the words were required in the result. Then I searched NOT france and only recieved 636,000


Strategies to get the most numer of hits:
A general unrestricted google search seems to return the most number of hits. Using general words will get a broad mix of search results.

To get the most relevant results:
A good strategy for this is to use inverted commas to search for consecutive words. For example when i was searching for Surfing Portugal I used commas and had much more relevant results.
Using NOT helps by manually excluding the irrelevant words.

Information only from University databases:
Use a search from the deep web. Such as turbo10.com these search engines can be set to only search databases.