In our library databases, you'll find that you are asked to construct searches a bit differently than you might in Google, for example. You'll often see multiple search boxes (see below). These actually allow you to build more complex searches than one search box alone would.
Let's say that you're interested in the gender dynamics of retellings of Le Petit Chaperon Rouge. Here is how I would construct that search:
This tells the database: I only want to find articles that talk about ALL 3 of these things: Gender, retellings, and Le Petit Chaperon Rouge. Note that this is NOT the same search as the following:
The above search just tells the database: try to find me something that has these words (ANY of these words or ANY combination of these words) appear in it.