4.3.) Boolean search methodology

a.) Strategy for biggest number of hits

To get a very high number of hits I would use an “or “as conjunction between the different key words.

For Copernic this results in a number of hits of 81.
Google shows a results number of 3430.000.000.

b.) Strategy to get most relevant hits.

As I am looking for referencing material I limit my search to edu. domains as these are run but research and learning based institutions. Further I opt for the “and” conjunction between my different key words.

For Copernic this results as in my first search in 4.2 in 57 hits, so it seems as if Copernic does some sort of “quality” search already initially.

For Google this limitation results in a hit number of 1350 hits, which is only a fraction of the previous search. Here the adding of the “edu” domain is somehow a bit different interpreted allowing for the web page already when “edu” is already contained somewhere in the text.

c.) Strategy aiming to find only university sources

In order to achieve this I repeat to add a request for an “edu” domain, but use for the key words no specific conjunction so an “or”.

For Copernic the number of hit only increased slightly to 58.
For Google the number now increases exponentially to 86.200.000.

To draw a conclusion from the results; It is useful to use Boolean search logic to limit the results to a number of pages, which can be reviewed. I would assume anything exceeding significantly 1000 pages is far too much. The Copernic search is a bit more comfortable than Google by doing a higher pre selection, while Google has the advantage to pick up more pages so leaving a greater choice to the researcher.