Several years ago, I wrote about how librarians will become experts in web searching. While I still believe that this is true, there is no reason that everyone can’t become masters at getting good search results. Lately, I’ve noticed that the ability of people to effectively search using a search engine (my engine of choice is Google) is quite limited and if people learned how to search better, it would really help them.
Anyone can enter words into a search engine, it takes some skill to figure out which words are going to produce the best results in the shortest amount of time, hence “the art of Googling”. If you enter too few words or too many words, the results will either be non-existent or provide too many that the results are useless. Even if you enter the right number of words, you have to know which words will get good results.
I seem to have a knack for searching as I can get results quite quickly. Maybe there should be a high school or college class in searching. If more people could search by themselves, us tech savvy people would have to answer far fewer questions that we consider below our pay grade!
So throw us a bone. Tell us your google searching secrets. Or at least a few examples.
You want a bone? If I keep all the knowledge to myself, I retain the power, right? 🙂
Here are some things that I do:
Alternatively, you can do what others do and open a chat with me and I’ll just become your search engine 🙂