The other day someone handed me a problem to solve. A solution to this particular problem had several very smart people tied up in knots for months with the consensus being to scrap everything and start over. I was able to solve this particular problem after about 45 minutes, not thanks to any innate advantage I had but rather because I knew how to mine Google to find the information that turned out to be the key to the problem.
Occasionally some article or speech appears in which a librarian or some other academic-type slams Google and other search engines as little more than toys that don’t produce results worth a damn. I don’t understand that approach at all. The problem is not Google or Yahoo! or whatever — the problem is that most people don’t have the slightest notion about how to perform anything but the most rudimentary queries of electronic databases. Rather than slamming the limitations of search engines like Google, librarians and others should be helping users understand how to query Google and similar search engines to get past those limitations and drill down to the information they’re looking for.
Fortunately, there are a slew of books out there to help the casual searcher get more out of searching. My favorites — the two I actually keep at my desk — are Tara Calishain’s Web Search Garage and Tara Calishain’s and Rael Dornfest’s Google Hacks, 2nd edition.
Calishain, of course, is the person behind Research Buzz and between her site and the two books, I have the same sort of reverence and awe for her that most people would probably reserve for celebrities and rock stars.
Web Search Garage is the place to start if you’re a relative newbie to search. The first few chapters are very basic, guiding the reader through the differences between a directory-style engine like Yahoo! and a full-text search engine such as Google. Gradually the chapters get a bit more sophisticated as far as discussing concepts and techniques to get the most out of search engines, but its never overly technical.
Calishain does an excellent job of explaining in plain language how to construct and then narrow or expand search terms as the user tries to find specific information. This is probably the #1 problem I see when watching other people search Google — they know what they’re looking for, but they don’t have a good idea as to how to translate that into search terms that are likely to produce meaningful results, nor do they tend to be able to sample those results and come up with new search terms. Calishain outlines a great system and set of concepts that will guide the novice searcher through exactly that process.
And along the way, she has some tips for people like me who may perform several few hundred searches every day and already have a pretty good handle on finding most everything in Google. I always hate that cliche that a book is appropriate both for novices and experts, but in this case its really true.
Google Hacks, on the other hand, is aimed squarely at geeks and search addicts. It has a number of tips for searching Google, of course, but concentrates a lot more on using the Google API and services like Gmail. This is the sort of book you want to read once you’ve mastered Web Search Garage.
The two together are like that class in high school on search that students should be receiving but almost certainly never will. Publicly available full text search engines like this are barely a decade old, and you can already find the answer to pretty much anything you might want to know other than narrow scholarly issues if you just know how to ask the right way. Web Search Garage and Google Hacks will help you get to the point of asking the right question much faster and more efficiently.