Slice like a pro: Brackets for more than just smilie faces

:-) happy ;-) winking happy ;-)) with a double chin

Admit it. You've sent a smilie face to a a friend or two. But did you know brackets can bring you infinite joy when you're building your search strings? They're the crowdpleasers of the keyboard. Here's why...

1. Precedence
In Slice our search engine reads search strings from left to right, so to be sure of your search intent, use brackets. Brackets will group together your ideas and direct the search engine correctly. For example, say you want articles relating to computers in teaching or education. If you created this search string without brackets...

computers and teaching or education

... the search engine will process this string from left to right, with the "AND" request first, making the string read as "(Computers and Teaching) or Education" - which is a disaster! This string would give you all articles with the words "computers" AND "teaching", and then another bunch of articles which simply contain the word "education". This was not the intent of your orginial search!

But if you use brackets to clearly define your search as all articles containing the words "computers" AND either the words "teaching" OR "education" you would have a search string that looks like this:

computers AND (teaching OR education)
This will find articles containing the word "computers", and either "teaching" or "education".

The search string qualifer in Slice will help you with this too.


2. Clarity
Brackets work as a great visual aid when constucting complex strings. Here's an example of using brackets to break the search up into sections, for example:

computers AND (teaching OR education) NOT (higher OR secondary)
This will give news items containing the words "computers" and either "teaching" or "education", but will not give you the article is if the words "higher" or "secondary" are also in the article.

3. Variations
They're also helpful to group together variations of spellings which could be reported in various ways by the media. Here's an example if you were wanting to track stories about Dr Mike Whyte:

(Dr OR doctor) AND (Mike OR Michael) AND (Whyte OR White)

4. Combining searchesYou can also use brackets to bind together a series of searches to avoid having to develop separate tracking folders. For example if you wanted to track Dr Mike Whyte and Professor Jim McNamara here's what the string could look like:

((Dr OR doctor) AND (Mike OR Michael) AND (Whyte OR White)) AND ((Prof* OR Prf) AND (Jim OR James) AND (MacNamara OR McNamara))


We hope these tips have made you feel ;-)))))))

Tracking the media, monitoring the message

Doh! We couldn't help ourselves...

/.-( emo |:) unibrow @:^) elvis