Its a long time since I studied mathematics at any level. I was never that good but managed a pass at Higher School Certificate all those years ago. Boolean logic seemed to ring a bell. After having a look at the tutorial Boolean searching on the internet it sort of all came flooding back to me.
Google automatically uses the Boolean logical AND operator when you type a series of words in the search box. I thought then I could type in the logical operator OR into the search .This Nutrition OR Long Distance cycling. Google logically asked me whether I meant Nutrition for Long Distance Cycling and returned 615,000 hits.

I then realised that Google offered an advance search page. I have taken a screen print and shown it below.

Advanced Search Screen - taken from Google .com

Advanced Search Screen - taken from Google .com

You can readily see that Google will allow you to use Boolean logic to refine your search.

I first went for maximum hits (nutrition or Long distance cycling ) Ripper Rita! 180,000,000 hits see for yourself. I could probably get more if I asked for nutrition or long distance or cycling. This is outside what I am looking for , but only for interest 283,000,000 hits. But lets get back to reality.

Long distance cycling is also known as Randonneuring . Substituting , I ended up with 133,000,000. But the purpose is not to find an either or. I am looking specifically for nutrition advice to help me in my chosen hobby. Obviously I need to limit the search .

Therefore I need to search for Nutrition for Randonneuring. This search was limited to 13,800 hits. Having a short attention span, I scanned the first page of the information returned. There was one article that related specifically to what I was looking for, the others were general pages that described the sport and contained the word nutrition as part of the preparation for the sport. I then did a search on Nutrition for Long distance cycling. 305,000 hits, but the information returned was more relevant. This is due,I think, because the most common term to describe the sport is Long distance cycling. Randonneuring is more specific and it also covers more than just cycling.

BTW I also did the same search in Google scholar but the information was more at a medical level than what I required.

As I am in the sport, I could also use my inside knowledge to go to specific club sites or to sites designed to sell nutritional supplements to cyclists. These are biased but they do provide good generic guidelines as to proper eating and drinking habits. There are also the Institute of Sport websites that also provide good information.

Then I proceeded to look for information coming from university sources. As suggested I included education in the search parameter. This returned 67,600 hits. None came from universities but some good books were referred to.

So where does this leave my search. Admittedly I have a lot of information to trawl through to see which I should keep and which I should ignore. But I am going to get information overload?

My answer is a fence sitting ” it depends”. In my case I will look at a few websites and see whether I can obtain links to more specific information or find specific words that I can feed into a new search parameter. The topic I am looking for will have many contributions from experienced riders offering opinions. If I wanted to find the author of a quote, I would simply type in the quote. Google will still present multiple results but there will be a definitive answer.

When you are searching for general information, it will be necessary to read some articles that will lead you, eventually, to the information you are seeking. But importantly you may find information you did not know you wanted to find.