At some point, every Internet genealogist has used a search engine and gotten thousands of irrelevant results. That's because search engines are like trained puppies—they fetch whatever you throw them. For instance, if you type john mackenzie into a search engine, it will find every page containing the words john and mackenzie, but not necessarily in that order. That means you'll get results such as John Thompson who works at the Mackenzie Institute, or Mackenzie Brown, teammate of Gordon John. Would you rather wade through all those irrelevant pages or refine your search to bring back the best bones? Search-engine math to the rescue!

Most search engines use operators to help refine searches. The most-common operators are quotation marks (""), the plus sign (+) and the minus sign (-). Here's how each operator works:

Quotation marks
Use quotation marks when you want to find an exact phrase. In the example above, if we had searched for "john mackenzie," the search engine would have looked for instances in which the words john and mackenzie appeared side by side and in that order. When I typed john mackenzie into Google, the popular search engine returned 1,260,000 hits. But when I searched for "john mackenzie," I got only 19,600. That's still a lot, but don't worry—we'll refine our search even more.

Plus sign
Use the plus sign (or the word and) when you want the search engine to look for multiple words or terms. Let's pretend that you're trying to locate John Mackenzie records relevant to his life in Massachusetts. Your search would look like this: "john mackenzie" +massachusetts or "john mackenzie" +ma or "john mackenzie" and massachusetts. (Be sure to try more searches using variant spellings or abbreviations.) The plus sign or word and tells the search engine to return only the matches for "john mackenzie" that also include massachusetts, weeding out all the others.

Minus sign
The minus sign tells a search engine to exclude a specific word. If your search for "john mackenzie" returned hundreds of John Mackenzies who lived in Maine, and you want only those who lived in Massachusetts, here's how you'd construct the search: "john mackenzie" +massachusetts -maine. (Have you noticed that I never capitalize my search phrases? It's because search engines aren't case sensitive, so I save myself the trouble of reaching for the Shift key!)

Two more helpful operators are or and near. Use or when either of two words is appropriate, and you want the search engine to find all instances where either word appears. For example, you might use this operator if John Mackenzie's nickname was Jack. By typing "john mackenzie" or "jack mackenzie" into the search engine, you'll find any pages that include either his given name or his nickname. (Of course, this operator might give you more search results.)

Although it doesn't work with all search engines, near is another helpful operator. Near tells the search engine that your search terms must be in proximity to one another (usually within 10 words). When would you use near? If John Mackenzie's middle name was Albert and you searched for "john mackenzie," the search engine wouldn't return pages with the name John Albert Mackenzie. To make sure that the engine returns all pages with his full name, too, you could search for john near mackenzie.

Check the Advanced Search or Help section of your favorite search engine to learn more about the operators it uses. That way, you'll get fewer irrelevant hits the next time you search.