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Using search engines effectively is such a great, often overlooked skill. It's something that folks often think as a given, but being able to quickly find an answer or resource can appear as "techno voodoo" to some. I've tried to make a habit of not telling people "just Google it!" when they ask me a question, and instead "Let's Google it" - to open up for an opportunity to help someone try to find an answer by "aski…
A useful cue sheet thank you.
Googling is important, and I hear it everywhere, but in my opinion "deep work", learning the basics, and focus is just as important. You can't google yourself out of every situation. You must be willing to dive deep into a topic, read a lot, think and understand things well. What googling often means is that you just open on the top 10 hits, scroll through, read two paragraphs, and if the solution is not immediately…
Googling is part of the skill, actually digging into results is another one that is just as valuable.
1. "How do I do this?" The question often that can be resolved with a search. This person would rather wait for an answer than do the work of a simple search.
2. "Will this work?" along with some snippet of code.
I have to remind myself that they're often kids that have yet to learn how to learn. Still, these are basic skills (searching and experimenting) that should be taught as part of every HS programming class.
Then I have the horrifying thought that the people asking these questions are adults that I will either have to work with, or worse, be managed by.
The article is missing several operators that are useful. Like inurl:, intitle:, allintitle:, etc. The "AROUND" proximity search is neat as well, especially for words with dual meaning. like: bootstrap AROUND(6) cpu Finds "bootstrap" within 6 words of "cpu", which culls out most (not all) of the unwanted results about the bootstrap js library. This article seems to cover most of the ones I'm aware of: https://ahrefs.…
Recently, I’ve mainly been working on a niche Clojure project and a personal C++ game+engine project. For Clojure, I get along best with clojuredocs, the readme for whatever library I’m using and just reading the code. I only really found google/SO useful for Clojure in the early days when I was still learning it, but I’ve been writing Clojure for ten years now.
For C++, I keep cppreference.org open and also the readme’s for the libraries I use (mostly header only libraries) and ill look at the headers too. The only library I’ve really spent a lot of time googling is the Bullet physics engine (it’s woefully underdocumented unless you’re using the python bindings). Any time I’ve tried googling for error messages, I’ve found it less than useful so instead I guess I’ve just gotten better at trying to understand obscure clang errors (usually template errors). I’ve also needed some help doing more advanced things with the EnTT library, but the author is very responsive on github and discord.
In my previous job, I was mainly working on automating various AWS service interaction with terraform and python and while I did occasionally google for things, I almost always ended back on the terraform and AWS official documentation pages anyway.
I also learned to program at a time when my internet access was irregular, so relied on offline copies of documentation for all my needs. Maybe that helped me rely less on quick fix searches, although I definitely went through a phase of that some years ago.
As for the article, besides quotes for exact matches, I don’t think I’ve ever bothered with any of the other tips, in years if ever. Got on just fine without it ;-)
What's often overlooked and omitted from this sort of guide is a person's ability to identify the trustworthiness and usefulness of a website that shows up in search results. It's not enough to juggle operands and search hacks. You also need to know which result to click. Another commenter suggested just searching for your error message. Try searching for "cannot read property of undefined" and scroll through the res…
The academic and scholarly field you are referencing in your first paragraph is referred to as “information literacy“ We’re looking at this and students generally we look for the number of stages that need to be completed: Identification of the need for new information Searching and strategies for finding the needed information. Assessment of the usefulness of the information Evaluation of the credibility of the info…