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Get better at Googling

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Re: Get better at Googling

#131

Post by ehsankia »

whitepaint wrote: post #72
bellyfullofbac wrote: post #26

Google used to be better, I feel. Nowadays when you add a particular word to make the search specific (otherwise it's too general), Google decides for you, there aren't many results with that keyword, so it excludes the word and gives you a list of irrelevant things. Yeah I know to put the words I want in quotes, but why doesn't it do that by default?

I've read similar comments so many times. Am I the only one who thinks Google has become way way better than it used to? Very often I get immediate answers even without needing to click on any site. It's truly magical.

I agree with you. There are way too many "X used to be better" for all of them to be true, most likely you don't remember all the bad parts.

I remember when half of search results would be pages literally filled with nothing but keywords to get hits. I remember getting a ton of programming results from forums that couldn't even format code snippets properly.

Not to be dismissive of other people's subjective experience but it seems to be like nostalgia glasses remembering things in a more favorable way from the past.

Re: Get better at Googling

#133

Post by net_greybeard »

lostcolony wrote: post #110
net_greybeard wrote: post #92

Google is okay for research on how other people have achieved something. But generally these days I am of the opinion it just teaches you bad habits. I really wish people would just read the docs instead of just googling. I am working on a large typescript solution and almost every error in the application is due to the original developers not reading the docs and instead just googling stuff from stack overflow. Also…

"Just read the docs" depends on how good the docs are, and how discoverable they are. For instance, searching for "Java read a file", I find a bunch of examples. And they mostly are good enough, call out when they aren't, and provide useful links. Meanwhile, navigating Oracle's website is a nightmare. https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/essential/io/file.ht... exists, and is actually pretty helpful, but the only…

Obviously. If the docs are garbage then you are going to have to find alternatives. However these days devs have never had it better.

Re: Get better at Googling

#134

Post by js8 »

pizza234 wrote: post #119
net_greybeard wrote: post #92

Google is okay for research on how other people have achieved something. But generally these days I am of the opinion it just teaches you bad habits. I really wish people would just read the docs instead of just googling. I am working on a large typescript solution and almost every error in the application is due to the original developers not reading the docs and instead just googling stuff from stack overflow. Also…

> I really wish people would just read the docs instead of just googling. I am working on a large typescript solution and almost every error in the application is due to the original developers not reading the docs and instead just googling stuff from stack overflow. It's a bit more complicated than that. I do read the docs, but using the web is essential for me, for a few reasons: - nowadays, a dev doesn't work on a…

No, it's actually pretty simple. Software industry faces the similar problem that journalism faces, we increasingly skip on quality, in a race to the bottom. We hope to fix this by technology, but in the end we just create more work for ourselves.

> nowadays, a dev doesn't work on an area that can be included in a single book

Which is terrible because it means that there is less specialization and its benefits for productivity.

> the docs may not be good

You get what you pay for.

> there may be issues that require workarounds that are not described in the docs

You get what you pay for.

> best practices may not be obvious even when reading the docs

You get what you pay for.

Don't get me wrong, OSS is amazing, but in commercial software, you also pay for support & documentation. But since nobody wants to pay for the software anymore, we end up with using Google instead of reading the documentation. And this becomes self-fulfilling prophecy, why provide good documentation if nobody is gonna read it?

It would be ridiculous if somebody wrote an article stating that "googling it" is the most important skill for a mechanical engineer or a doctor. But for software engineering, it is acceptable. Looks like software engineering is becoming less and less about engineering every day.

Addendum: SW developers also seem to write less, comments or other human-readable explanations. This might also contribute to less appreciation of good SW documentation, and contributes to a worrying trend of being less literate.

Re: Get better at Googling

#135

Post by tiagod »

ksec wrote: post #61

>AND operator will return only results related to both terms: html AND css This is new to me. So what is the difference between searching html css and html AND css ?

I just tried it. Searching html AND css shows pages with the words together (like "html & css" and "html, css, ...")

Re: Get better at Googling

#136

Post by devoutsalsa »

tyingq wrote: post #18

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.…

I didn't know about AROUND(N), thanks.

Re: Get better at Googling

#137

Post by tyingq »

elondaits wrote: post #115
eitland wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the linked article: > “search term” > Force an exact-match search. Use this to refine results for ambiguous searches, or to exclude synonyms when searching for single words. Author claimed they tested all of the operators, but this one in particular I can confirm haven't worked reliably for me for over a decade and across a number of machines and accounts. Some times it can be traced down to things like me searc…

Try opening the “Search tools” menu in the results page and selecting “Verbatim”... I think that makes “literal” searches work, because otherwise Google uses synonyms and language analysis to attempt to match your search to results.

The query parameter google adds for verbatim matches is tbs=li, so you can append that to the url, like

  https://www.google.com/search?q="somestring"&tbs=li
Some other uses of "tbs": https://stenevang.wordpress.com/2013/02/22/google-advanced-p...

Re: Get better at Googling

#138

Post by mywittyname »

lostcolony wrote: post #110
net_greybeard wrote: post #92

Google is okay for research on how other people have achieved something. But generally these days I am of the opinion it just teaches you bad habits. I really wish people would just read the docs instead of just googling. I am working on a large typescript solution and almost every error in the application is due to the original developers not reading the docs and instead just googling stuff from stack overflow. Also…

"Just read the docs" depends on how good the docs are, and how discoverable they are. For instance, searching for "Java read a file", I find a bunch of examples. And they mostly are good enough, call out when they aren't, and provide useful links. Meanwhile, navigating Oracle's website is a nightmare. https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/essential/io/file.ht... exists, and is actually pretty helpful, but the only…

A developer who is new to a technology absolutely needs to read the documents. No matter how good or bad, it's important because it probably tells you a lot of stuff you wouldn't learn on your own (or that someone else will teach you wrong).

I do a lot of GCP work anymore, and the amount of devs who make service authentication way more complicated than it needs to be is really freaking high. It's clear that the people who kicked off the project are pulling blocks from SO rather than RTFM because the FM has a simple decision tree for how to use authentication. Reading through the docs could have saved these projects each hours of time, simplified deployment and reduced the security risks associated with passing around json auth tokens (or worse: checking them into VCS.

Re: Get better at Googling

#139

Post by tiagod »

yepthatsreality wrote: post #105
deeg wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an older developer and I google constantly. I deal with Java, Typescript, Scala, Ruby, Python, and bash on a regular basis and sometimes I forget the syntax or method for an operation. I can usually find it within seconds.

I see older developers do it too. And which sites do you find this information on. Is it in the documentation? Wouldn’t it be quicker to just know what docs will tell you that info each time instead of searching for “Java function signature” or “JS pass-by-value” and going to the same place. You’re welcome to continuously search for stuff if that workflow is useful to you, but it’s not very efficient.

Honestly, the documentation builtin search engine is usually way worse than google's. If I type something like "python 3.4 queue docs" I'm at the right docs page for that exact module and version in seconds.

Re: Get better at Googling

#140

Post by dannyphantom »

tyingq wrote: post #18

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.…

I saw this a few days ago on the front page of HN. Thought it was pretty good. https://www.gwern.net/Search
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