Google Scholar and Google Patents are powerful, but many people who use Google to search don’t understand a major misunderstanding in Google search, which is its “or” search. An incorrect “or” search often results in missing a large number of documents without you realizing it. Different search tools or platforms have different search rules and features. We must understand the rules clearly before using them, otherwise it will be easy to waste time and energy doing a lot of useless work.
Google Scholar and Google Patents are very powerful, but many people who use Google to search do not understand a major misunderstanding in Google search, which is its "OR" search. Incorrect "OR" search often causes the search results to miss a large number of documents without knowing it.
Some people may say: Google search is very easy to operate. Just input a few words and a lot of relevant information will come out. Logical operations or professional searches have nothing to do with me. Don’t tell me about AND or NOT. This kind of Buddhist baby is fine for some daily life searches, but when searching for an existing technology or conducting invalid searches, you can't be so casual.
To give a recent example, people in the industry may have heard about the patent war between HKC and Innolux. As a semiconductor person, I am very concerned about this and can't help but want to get involved. After consulting a large amount of relevant literature information, the editor learned that some of the patents in this patent war involve forming spacers between two substrates in a display panel. According to the examiner's search report, "spacer" is expanded to include multiple expressions such as "spacer or spacer or insulator, spacer+". Some people must be asking, why do we need to expand? In fact, in the process of patent search, in order to ensure the quality of search results, expanding the search terms into multiple expressions is one of the important means. If we put the expanded results of "spacer" into Google for search, it will involve an "or" operation between these expanded keywords.
Some students may say: Just copy the expression of spacer “SPACER or 隔垫物 or 隔物 or 隔物” into Google and search it. It is very simple. I do it every day. Let's try it. If we enter "SPACER or spacer or spacer or insulator" in Google Patents, 2,230 documents will be searched. Browsing the results, we find that they are indeed very relevant. Is this really something that everyone on earth would do? Come, let’s continue analyzing.
In Google search, it is well known that "space" means "and" search. We have also accepted this search rule in daily search. For example, if we want to know about the infringement case between Sogou and Baidu, we often search for "Sogou Baidu infringement". The space in the middle is the relationship of "and". Back to our case, we enter "SPACER spacer spacer insulator" in Google to search. Look at the search results in the picture below. Have you found some problems? How come the results for both an “or” search and an “and” search for the words representing the spacers are 2,230?
Let me show you another search chart. We change the lowercase "or" to uppercase "OR" and enter "SPACER OR spacer OR spacer OR insulator" to search. You can see that the results have changed again. This time the number of search results has increased by hundreds of times, from the previous 2,230 results to 4,920,000. In addition, the patent ranked at the top has also changed. Are you a little dizzy? Which result is correct? Below we use a table to make an intuitive comparison of the above searches:
Search Number | Search | Operators | Search results (items) |
1 | SPACER or spacer or spacer or spacer | Lowercase or | 2,230 |
2 | SPACER spacer spacer spacer | Space | 2,230 |
3 | SPACER OR spacer OR spacer OR spacer | Capital or | 4,920,000 |
By comparing the above tables, we can see that if we use lowercase "or" to search for "or" in Google, the search results are consistent with the "space and" search results. In fact, both searches are for the "and" relationship. That is to say, the lowercase "or" also performed an "and" search. Since the search showed more relevant results, it was difficult for people to find out that they were wrong.
Therefore, when searching in Google, everyone should remember that for "or" search, uppercase "OR" must be used as the operator, while lowercase "or" represents the "and" operation. So why is lowercase "or" an "and" search? This is related to Google's word indexing rules. In order to improve computing efficiency, Google ignores a large number of function words, conjunctions, punctuation marks, etc. Therefore, ignoring "lowercase or" is equivalent to "space", which is why it is an "and" search. Different search tools or platforms have different search rules and features. We must understand the rules clearly before using them, otherwise it will be easy to waste time and energy doing a lot of useless work.
