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The expression ‘NOT’ allows you to eliminate specific results that you know you don’t want.

Suppose you live in Didsbury, near Manchester and want to play tennis somewhere different. You could use ‘NOT’ to tell the search engine to find places to play tennis in Manchester, but not in Didsbury.

In most search engines, ‘NOT’ is represented with a minus sign. Your search term would look like this:

• tennis manchester - didsbury

Using this search term you would get a list of results for places to play tennis in Manchester, but excluding anywhere in Didsbury.

Using quotes to remove results

You can use the Boolean expression ‘NOT’ to remove results from your searches. You can also use quotes for a similar purpose.

Suppose you wanted to play tennis in Manchester but your racquet is broken. You can use the internet to find out where you can buy a new racquet. To do this, you could use the search term:

• buy AND tennis AND racquets AND manchester

This would work, but your results might not be too specific - some websites may not refer to buying tennis racquets at all, because the search engine simply finds any website that contains all four keywords.

By using quotes, you can tell the search engine to specifically look for sites that tell you where you can buy tennis racquets in Manchester:

• “buy tennis racquets” AND manchester

This search term only finds websites that contain the exact phrase “buy tennis racquets” along with the word ‘manchester’.