In praise of simple search.

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I'm well aware that the following claim stands a good chance of unleashing the wrath of many a good and respectable librarian, but I'll make it just the same. For the vast majority of searches that even an information junkie might be called upon to perform, I'm convinced that simple search does the trick just as well as advanced search does. What's more, though learning the ins and outs of advanced search isn't particularly difficult, the time devoted to learning these intricacies might better be spent simply running more searches and gaining more experience. Though I certainly don't think that today's search engines are capable of replacing a research librarian, I do think that these engines have increasingly become better at honing in on the useful and valuable materials for which we're (hopefully) ultimately searching. Certainly we still need at least a healthy dosage of common sense in order to evaluate the results of our searches, but we need that for any sort of search we might conduct.

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Go to: Via search-colored lenses, or
Go to: Search Rules!