Lots of websites, libraries, and databases will have a basic search and an advanced search.
A basic search is when you type your search in to a search box and hit enter. The below example is from the IADT Library website:
An advanced search form is where you are more deliberate in your search, and tell the website where exactly within the results you want to search, and how you want those search terms to interact with each other:
The advanced search form has several options which can focus or widen your search, eliminate clutter in the search results, and provide a more precise set of results within one long search, rather than within multiple smaller ones.
1. You can choose where exactly within the items you are searching. Do you want your topic to appear in the title, in the subject terms, in the author, within a particular publication? You can decide this here through the dropdown field menus.
2. You can search multiple things at once for one large search string/phrase.
For example, in the search in the screenshot above, imagine you are searching for primary school teacher job satisfaction, but not university lecturer job satisfaction. Therefore this search reflects that - it is saying you want to search for either job or employee satisfaction, you want the word 'teaching' to be in the title of any article you find, and you don't want the word 'university' to appear.
Some more detailed information on combining search strings like this can be found in the "More detailed searching" tab here, where you can find out how to use brackets to do this search string manually, instead of using this form. This is handy if a site you are using doesn't have an advanced searching for available.
3. Any combination of 'and', 'or', and 'not' instructions can be combined with any number of search fields.
4. You can add new lines in to the search form - the screenshot above has , but you can take away or add lines if you need to using the small plus and minus buttons.
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