Posted on by Scott Gruby

The Art of Googling

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!

2 Replies to “The Art of Googling”

    1. You want a bone? If I keep all the knowledge to myself, I retain the power, right? 🙂

      Here are some things that I do:

      • Avoid using words that are 3 letters or less with the exception of “Mac”, “c” in the context of “objective c” and “git” (basically specific short words can give good results).
      • If searching for an error message, make sure to paste the entire message, but remove dates and times and any hex that looks to be computer specific.
      • Use multiple words in the search, for instance ‘uiview uiviewcontroller’ for a search I did to see how to get the UIViewController for a UIView (I did the search for someone else; it’s kind of the wrong way to do things, but…).
      • Don’t use quotes in the searches even if you’re looking for a particular sentence.
      • Don’t use + or – to remove strings from the search results.
      • If you don’t see good results in the first few links, try again with different terms.
      • Don’t get too fancy with the terms, but spend a few seconds trying to form a sentence in your head and then strip out the fluff.

      Alternatively, you can do what others do and open a chat with me and I’ll just become your search engine 🙂

      Reply

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