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Lesson 3.4: OR and quotes

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This is lesson 3.4. In this lesson we're going to learn about two new operators, the OR operator and how to use double quotes correctly. I see a lot of people not using them quite correctly; you won't have this problem after this lesson.

We use double quotes for two purposes, one is to find a phrase like a connected series of words that you want to find in that order, and we also use it to find a specific sort of unusual spelling of a specific word.

Here's an example, this is a lyric from a song that I know: [ when Venus the goddess of beauty and love ] and I want to find the rest of those lyrics. It's all that I remember, the first line, what's the rest of it? So we can search for just that set of words in that order or we could double quote it.

Let me show you what the difference is live. So here we can do a query [ when Venus the goddess of beauty and love ] like that and you'll see the results, they're great, but they're all about Venus.

Venus is a goddess, Venus is a mythological creature, but nothing about the song that I'm looking for, no lyrics in here, so what I'm going to do is go back and modify the query by adding double quotes around the phrase.

Quote [ “when Venus the goddess of eating is love” ] double quote at the end and now we run the whole query and you'll see in fact the very first hit is a piece of music.

So, let's click on that and see if we actually found the thing we're looking for and voila, there it is! You see the very first line here “when Venus the goddess of beauty and love” and then it goes on and on and on. You see why I don't remember the rest of the lyrics, it's a long song. Point is that you can often find phrases by using a double quote for two, three, four or five words. You can make it almost as long as you want. But my recommendation is that you use a phrase that you're pretty sure of; if you're not sure of a word in the middle leave it out, just do a smaller phrase rather than the entire long probably misremembered phrase.

The other reason we use double quotes is to make sure a word is spelled exactly the way we want. For instance, here's an example of a word that I want to search for with this spelling E-N-T-E-E at the end of guarantee. The reason is that a linguist once told me that there once was a debate about whether or not it should be with an A-N-T-E or E-N-T-E-E.

So, how do I find that? I’ll show you. I go to Google and I search for [ guarentee ]. Now, see the little red underline? That's Google telling me you're probably not spelling it correctly. So I'm going to do the search anyway, because I really want to find this spelling and the spell correction kicks in, which is great normally but not in this circumstance. In this page the spelling substitution, the spell correction has taken over.

That's not what I want, so I'm going to double quote the single word, so this is not a phrase search. This double quote is saying to Google: ‘Give me exactly the spelling, don't try to fix it for me’. When we do that it offers this spell correction but does not enforce it. Okay, so all these results here are about the standard spelling versus the variant spelling and it turns out there is a whole debate about it, who knew? So, this is one of the reasons you want to do that, it is especially useful for city names that are unusual, spellings that might get spell corrected to something else or for people who spell their name in an interesting way, say with two Y's rather than one. So, there are really two reasons to use the double quote operator: double quote for a phrase, double quote for a single word that's a variant spelling.

The other operator I mentioned to you is the OR operator. Now OR is a classic boolean operator it's kind of the only thing that's really left of ordinary boolean logic in Google. It basically allows you to say search for this OR for that. So, here's my example I want to search for [ Tesla coil ] or [ Jacob's Ladder ]. If you don't know what [ Jacob's Ladder ] is you could search for it but it's kind of a cool, interesting version variation of a Tesla coil. Now the way OR works is it takes the first part, if you do for example, just the [ Tesla coil ] search, that's the first part of this query and it gives you bunch of results. But when you OR in an additional phrase or term it enlarges the set of results. That's what OR does. So, here this bigger orange oval shows you that [ Tesla coil ] or  [ Jacob's Ladder ] will give you more results.

Let me do [ ‘tesla coil” OR “Jacob's ladder” ]. So now you see I've got two synonymous terms here side by side and it is offering me a spell correction, yes it won't matter that much but here we have both movies called Jacob's Ladder, we have a Jacob's Ladder Wikipedia article and so on and so on. You can see it's kind of taken both results and merged them together. This is really handy when you're looking for synonymous terms or phrases and want both of the results merged together.

Let me show you one more example just to cement this idea. One term you might be searching for being [ pleurisy ] like that, but I know that another way to talk about this would be the word [ pleuritis ] P-L-E-U-R-I-T-I-S, like this. Okay, now in this case I'm searching for any article on the web that uses [ pleurisy ] or [ pleuritis ] so now I've got them combined together. You see now if you look further down here you see all this for example this Wikipedia article talked about [ pleuritis ] and [ pleurisy ]. So, it's a useful concept, it’s a useful operator to have. What I'd like you to do now is go on to the next activity and try to use these new operators that you now have and see if you can't get a little bit farther in your activity.

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(Updated 3/1/19 A. Awakuni Fernald)