Terms and Connectors Searching on WestlawNext v. Westlaw
If you type a terms and connectors search into the WestlawNext search box, you may not get the same results as doing the same search on Classic Westlaw. This is true if your search only includes the connectors: and, or, ” “. Why? WestlawNext applies WestSearch, not a Boolean search, and pulls up relevant documents according to the WestSearch algorithm. The algorithm adds synonyms to your Boolean search terms to broaden your search. It may exclude documents that appear in the classic Westlaw search because it does not pull up every document with the specified terms, as some of these may not be relevant under the WestSearch algorithm.
For example, the search:
“sexual battery” and “excited utterance”
in WestlawNext yields 52 cases when selecting Ohio as the jurisdiction, while Classic Westlaw yields only 30 cases. WestlawNext reads the search as [“sexual battery” “excited utterance”] but does not connect the words with an or – it processes the words with WestSearch. Not every document within the WestlawNext search result will have “sexual battery” AND “excited utterance” in them. WestlawNext picks up cases that use the terms sexual assault, gross sexual imposition, sexual contact and the like, adding to the number of results. But notice that the 52 WestlawNext results do not include all of the 30 cases pulled up on Classic Westlaw. Some of the documents pulled by Classic Westlaw which contain both phrases were deemed not relevant by the WestSearch algorithm. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as sometimes documents will includes your search terms but the document really only discusses in passing the idea you are interested in.
If you want a strict Boolean search, you can (1) use the Advanced Search by clicking on the button to the right of the orange search button and use the boxes for all these terms, phrase, any of these terms. It is much like a Google Advanced Search. Alternatively, you can (2) type Advanced: or adv: before your Boolean search in WestlawNext, the system will interpret it as a strict Boolean search.
Additionally, a strict Boolean search is applied when connectors such as /s, /p,/3, butnot, etc. are used. A terms and connectors search is performed when these other connectors are used instead of or in addition to: and, or, “”. For example, sex! /3 battery and “excited utterance” performs a strict search and yields 30 cases.
When you run a Boolean search in WestlawNext by any of the above methods (using connectors other than and, or, “”; using Advanced search, or typing adv: before the search), often times Westlaw will provide a link to other relevant results. These are documents WestSearch identifies as relevant to your search but that do not necessarily match the terms and syntax of your query. The link “Additional Relevant WestSearch Cases” will appear at the top of the page containing cases search results. 
Another possibility is to use the original search you performed on WestlawNext, “sexual battery” and “excited utterance”, and then use the Search Within Results filter to limit the results to documents containing only those terms. If you do so, you will get 20 hits down from 52. So, you are able to see some cases with those words highlighted, but recall that you will not be getting ALL the cases containing those words. (There are 30 cases containing both of those phrases).
For more information, see the following from the Westlaw Help Center:
