7508 posts
Australia
Posted 17 May 2013 - 03:12 AM
READ ME TO SEE HOW THIS IS RELEVANT
Ok so over the past few weeks there has been a LARGE increase in questions in Ask a Pro that could have been easily solved by the person reading the first link that appears on Google. Google is our friend. However they come to us and ask for help, now while this is not a bad thing, and don't get me wrong I am in no way discouraging people from asking questions in Ask a Pro, some effort and initiative into finding out answers yourself can go a long way with most people that are there answering your questions. This same thought is conveyed by Advert and Cloudy here.
I've personally noticed, upon asking people if they have Googled for an answer most respond yes and they couldn't find anything, yet when I search Google all I get are related results (maybe this is because I know how to Google efficiently?). I have also noticed some people saying they do not understand the results from Google, well I tried something sneaky these few times, I copy/pasted an explanation that I found on Google, normally the first link, and 4 of the 5 people actually said they understood this explanation much better.
So what was my conclusion?
Well my first conclusion is that people are lying when they said they had Googled already and/or understood the results. Sadly there is nothing that can be done to stop this.
My second conclusion is that maybe people are unfamiliar with the power of Google and what you can do with the searches to get you the best results every time. This we can help with.
So I've decided to share my knowledge and help everyone Google better. Here goes…
The Basic Searches
K.I.S.S. — (Keep It Simple Stupid)
Don't over complicate your search, keep the words you use to a minimum
Be descriptive yet concise
Add some more terms
If you aren't seeing the results you wanted after a simple search add some more terms
Only use important words
Do not use a full sentence or question. Why? Google tries to find the pages with the highest count of words in your search, too many words can limit the results
Search Operators
Search for an exact word or phrase — use quotation marks to search for an exact word or set of words. TIP: Only use this when looking for very precise words or phrases or else you could be excluding helpful results by mistake.
Exclude a word — Add a dash (-) before a word or site to exclude all results that include that word. TIP: This can be exceptionally useful if you wish to exclude certain sites from your search, for example Lua Split String -"lua-users" would return results for splitting a string in Lua, but will not include any results from lua-users.org
Include a word — Add a plus (+) before a word or site to include all results that include that word. TIP: This can be useful if you want to get results from certain sites, for example Lua Split String +"stackoverflow" would return results for splitting a string in Lua, but the top results would all be answers on StackOverflow
Include similar words — Add a tilde (~) immediately in front of a word to search for that word as well as more synonyms. For example (this one is hard to come up with a CC related example at this point in time) searching for ~dumb little man will give us results for "dumb little man", "stupid little man" and "funny little man"; combining this technique with the exclusion of words we can have this search phrase ~dumb little man -dumb and that will include "stupid little man" and "funny little man" but nothing with 'dumb' will appear in the results
Search within a site or domain — Include 'site:' to search for information withing a single website with all mentions of the search term; you can also use the URL of the site instead of 'site', for example computercraft.info/forums2/:gps allows us to search the ComputerCraft forums for any pages that include the term "GPS", something we cannot do in the forums search bar. We could also do computercraft.info:"change-log" to find where the change-log is on the ComputerCraft website.
Search prefixes — Include specific prefixes to help limit searches, for example "define:<term>" will show you definitions of the term supplied. 'urban:<term>' will give you a link to the Urban dictionary result for the search term (example: urban:iirc will tell you that iirc is "If I remember correctly" or "If I recall correctly"). You can also do prefixes like 'lua:' and all the results will be limited to relate to Lua
Fill in the blank — Using an asterisk (*) within a search acts as a wild card, use it with quotation marks and it will fill in the blanks for example "we all live in a * submarine" would give you results for The Beatles song 'Yellow Submarine'. Note in the event that you have two numbers on either side of the * it will not perform the 'fill in the blank' rule, but instead it will show the calculator.
Searching for either word — Using OR (must be capitalized) or the pipe symbol (|) can give you results using either word. Example 'cat dog pictures' would return you images of the cartoon Cat Dog, whereas 'cat | dog pictures' or 'cat OR dog pictures' would give you results of cats and dogs.
Some Other Simple Modifiers:
Tips from others
GravityScore
Fun game: Google Image Search "atari breakout"
EDIT: If you have any other tricks that you know of please feel free to post them. I'm pretty sure I've covered all the main ones.
EDIT 2: Check it out, we can already find this post from Google…. computercraft:Google efficiently
Ok so over the past few weeks there has been a LARGE increase in questions in Ask a Pro that could have been easily solved by the person reading the first link that appears on Google. Google is our friend. However they come to us and ask for help, now while this is not a bad thing, and don't get me wrong I am in no way discouraging people from asking questions in Ask a Pro, some effort and initiative into finding out answers yourself can go a long way with most people that are there answering your questions. This same thought is conveyed by Advert and Cloudy here.
I've personally noticed, upon asking people if they have Googled for an answer most respond yes and they couldn't find anything, yet when I search Google all I get are related results (maybe this is because I know how to Google efficiently?). I have also noticed some people saying they do not understand the results from Google, well I tried something sneaky these few times, I copy/pasted an explanation that I found on Google, normally the first link, and 4 of the 5 people actually said they understood this explanation much better.
So what was my conclusion?
Well my first conclusion is that people are lying when they said they had Googled already and/or understood the results. Sadly there is nothing that can be done to stop this.
My second conclusion is that maybe people are unfamiliar with the power of Google and what you can do with the searches to get you the best results every time. This we can help with.
So I've decided to share my knowledge and help everyone Google better. Here goes…
The Basic Searches
K.I.S.S. — (Keep It Simple Stupid)
Don't over complicate your search, keep the words you use to a minimum
ComputerCraft string tutorials
Lua String tutorials
Lua String split
Be descriptive yet concise
Not ideal: pull apart string
Not ideal: pulling apart a string lua
Better: split string Lua
Add some more terms
If you aren't seeing the results you wanted after a simple search add some more terms
First try: Lua
More Precise: Lua String
Even More Precise: Lua String Tutorial
Only use important words
Do not use a full sentence or question. Why? Google tries to find the pages with the highest count of words in your search, too many words can limit the results
Not ideal: how do I split one string into several other strings in Lua?
Better: split string Lua
Search Operators
Search for an exact word or phrase — use quotation marks to search for an exact word or set of words. TIP: Only use this when looking for very precise words or phrases or else you could be excluding helpful results by mistake.
Exclude a word — Add a dash (-) before a word or site to exclude all results that include that word. TIP: This can be exceptionally useful if you wish to exclude certain sites from your search, for example Lua Split String -"lua-users" would return results for splitting a string in Lua, but will not include any results from lua-users.org
Include a word — Add a plus (+) before a word or site to include all results that include that word. TIP: This can be useful if you want to get results from certain sites, for example Lua Split String +"stackoverflow" would return results for splitting a string in Lua, but the top results would all be answers on StackOverflow
Include similar words — Add a tilde (~) immediately in front of a word to search for that word as well as more synonyms. For example (this one is hard to come up with a CC related example at this point in time) searching for ~dumb little man will give us results for "dumb little man", "stupid little man" and "funny little man"; combining this technique with the exclusion of words we can have this search phrase ~dumb little man -dumb and that will include "stupid little man" and "funny little man" but nothing with 'dumb' will appear in the results
Search within a site or domain — Include 'site:' to search for information withing a single website with all mentions of the search term; you can also use the URL of the site instead of 'site', for example computercraft.info/forums2/:gps allows us to search the ComputerCraft forums for any pages that include the term "GPS", something we cannot do in the forums search bar. We could also do computercraft.info:"change-log" to find where the change-log is on the ComputerCraft website.
Search prefixes — Include specific prefixes to help limit searches, for example "define:<term>" will show you definitions of the term supplied. 'urban:<term>' will give you a link to the Urban dictionary result for the search term (example: urban:iirc will tell you that iirc is "If I remember correctly" or "If I recall correctly"). You can also do prefixes like 'lua:' and all the results will be limited to relate to Lua
Fill in the blank — Using an asterisk (*) within a search acts as a wild card, use it with quotation marks and it will fill in the blanks for example "we all live in a * submarine" would give you results for The Beatles song 'Yellow Submarine'. Note in the event that you have two numbers on either side of the * it will not perform the 'fill in the blank' rule, but instead it will show the calculator.
Searching for either word — Using OR (must be capitalized) or the pipe symbol (|) can give you results using either word. Example 'cat dog pictures' would return you images of the cartoon Cat Dog, whereas 'cat | dog pictures' or 'cat OR dog pictures' would give you results of cats and dogs.
Some Other Simple Modifiers:
- () — Just like in math, they tell Google to do this operation first
- .. — Results must include any number in the range; for example a date give 1930..40 can get better results than 1930-40)
Tips from others
GravityScore
- Google doesn't care about capitalisation, so don't worry about it when typing in your search terms
- Once you have found a website that helps you, use the find function in your browser (CTRL + F or ⌘ + F) to find your specific word or phrase you're after (this comes in handy on the Lua documentation as those pages can have a lot of text)
Fun game: Google Image Search "atari breakout"
EDIT: If you have any other tricks that you know of please feel free to post them. I'm pretty sure I've covered all the main ones.
EDIT 2: Check it out, we can already find this post from Google…. computercraft:Google efficiently
Edited on 17 May 2013 - 08:47 PM
