Hi everyone,

I can't remember if this has been discussed as a separate issue before. I have this nagging feeling it has been, but I can't find it.

There are many of you here that are expert Googlers and constantly amaze me in finding stuff. What is the procedure you use to weed through the garbage and find the substantive content that you're looking for? My GF was trying to find articles discussing the creative process and also critical commentary of Bob Dylan lyrics and she asked me for help with google. This got me thinking about general search fu methods.

Here's my general approach:

Try to think of phrases that are likely to appear in the content you're looking for, and include them in the search as a quote delimited exact phrase. This is a difficult skill to teach people. Any ideas on how to proceduralize this?

Repeat the search using synonyms.

Iteratively add keywords to reduce the solution space.

Include -"buy now" and -cart in the search to eliminate the commerce sites.

Another skill I've had trouble teaching (probably because I can't describe it well) is the ability to very quickly scan results and see what is likely a good quality hit. If you've ever watched an internet novice, they will put a single non-specific word into google, then click on each result including those that are obviously (to a sophisticated searcher) garbage. How do you describe and teach the ability to ignore junk results without spending much time on them, or even visiting the page?

What else does Master-level Google-Fu include?

Didn't I ask all of this once before? I must be getting old and senile...

Jim

Well, just now, I typed "google fu improving results" into (where else?) google.ca, and it gave this result in the first few:

http://ask.metafilter.com/15633/Improving-Your-GoogleFu

Cheers

Of course? Where else would you find a meta-answer to a meta-question? At MetaFilter.

Recursion makes my brain hurt. I'm going to go play some portal and then shoot myself.

That's funny as hell.

Another thing to watch out for is that for unquoted words google will include results for variants.

eg. for ticket booked the first two results have matched the words ticket book - you need to search for ticket "booked" to only return pages with those exact words.

The difference in those results isn't much, but with quite a few searches I do it is necessary to quote certain terms to get what I want.

I think a lot of it has to do with understanding what's required information and what's not. Of course, that has to do with the skill of knowing that you need to provide just enough information, but not too much.

For example, a novice would search for something like "bob dylan lyrics creative process critical commentary". That suffers from having too much information. I'd probably start with "dylan lyrics commentary".

Another tip is knowing when to refine your parameters. If you're not seeing data approaching what you want in the first page, you need to rethink, like I might end up changing mine to "dylan -thomas lyrics commentary".

Also, thinking of new search phrases helps, and sometimes you'll see them in your initial search results, so paying attention to the snippets on the search page is quite relevant.

The likelihood of a user refining his results, I think, depends a lot on his ability to initiate a new search quickly. Many people seem content to just grab the mouse and keep clicking "next" in hopes that they find what they want because that's faster. Assuming that Firefox is already my focused window, I can do almost anything without leaving the keyboard, and part of that is configuration. First, I get rid of the search widget. It's a waste of space and time. I just create keyword bookmarks for places I search a lot. The one for Google is "g". So when I want to search on something, I can just press "<ctrl-l>g dylan lyrics<return>" or just "<ctrl-t>g dylan lyrics<return>" if I want it in a new tab. Also, configuring Firefox to tab only to form elements (accessibility.tabfocus=3) helps. On Google search pages, that means you can hit tab once and be in the search field, ready to edit.

On the other hand, I'm not sure most people will get this. I see every day people who have used Windows for ten years log in by moving their mouse, clicking in the username field, slowly moving to their keyboard, typing their username, moving to their mouse, moving the mouse, clicking in the password field, moving to their keyboard, typing their password, moving to the mouse, moving their mouse, clicking on the login button. It literally takes them like ten seconds just to get from Ctrl-Alt-Del to accepting their login info. My point being that some people are never going to acquire these skills, because they seem to have no idea how to acquire them on their own, and you can't force these types of skills into someone.

Interesting - however I think we agree since I think it supports what I was saying [although as I was writing it I was worried about how well I was expressing myself ]

I think efficiency assessment - especially your own efficiency is related to the "self-monitoring skills" mentioned in the article.

Getting a clue requires someone to objectively consider that they may not have one - when you're trying to be more efficient, aren't you assessing your cluefullness and trying to improve it?

As an aside it's the same thing that makes me hate watching people present powerpoint shows - it's so telling when they click on the menus and slowly go through their rote process. You can spot the smart ones (even salesmen!) 'cos they know the important tricks...

You also see it in driving - those people who drive up to a junction and stop..... and *then* they turn their heads and look around. I assume it just simply never occurs to them to look around *before* they arrive...

Ah, the three tenets of perl programming - Laziness, Impatience and Hubris. So true in life.

That was a really interesting article. I've joked about that sort of thing for some time, but I never knew anyone had done any scientific testing.

I liked this quote:

Quote:
Such studies are not without critics. Dr. David C. Funder, a psychology professor at the University of California at Riverside, for example, said he suspects that most lay people have only a vague idea of the meaning of "average" in statistical terms.

"I'm not sure the average person thinks of 'average' or 'percentile' in quite that literal a sense," Funder said, "so 'above average' might mean to them 'pretty good,' or 'OK,' or 'doing all right.' And if, in fact, people mean something subjective when they use the word, then it's really hard to evaluate whether they're right or wrong, using the statistical criterion.''

It would seem to me that that would prove their incompetence, though.

It depends.... is ignorance == incompetence??

I'm not sure the term 'incompetent' is quite right. I think we're talking about behavioural attributes rather than skill/knowledge based attributes aren't we?
Competence implies (to me) task oriented skill and knowledge rather than a behavioural/potential thing.

Maybe the 'average' person is not a statistician. Whereas many above average people (eg who have done further education) will in fact have had training in statistics...

It seems to me that the above average people who misuse the terms are more incompetent than those ignorant of the terms?

In fact Dr Funder's criticism may be better aimed at the researchers for assuming competence in the use of statistical language by an average person?

The knowledge that we don't have here is whether researchers asked their subjects "what percentile did you lie in" or "how many people do you feel like you performed better than"? (We can probably assume that they didn't use only the term "average" since the report showed that the subjects rated themselves at specific percentiles.) And somehow I doubt that researchers looking into the study of incompetence would assume that people would know what percentiles are.

I found the paper. First, all of the participants were Cornell undergraduates, so we can assume that they have some reasonable level of education. It shouldn't be as if they're trying to explain the concept to someone raised by wolves. The most detailed explanation of their description to the participants on how to rank themselves is:

Quote:
Afterward, participants compared their "ability to recognize what's funny" with that of the average Cornell student by providing a percentile ranking. In this and in all subsequent studies, we explained that percentile rankings could range from 0 (I'm at the very bottom) to 50 (I'm exactly average) to 99 (I'm at the very top).

Unfortunately, it's still unclear the level to which they detailed the concept of percentiles. But they did specifically ask the participants to compare themselves with others, not on some absolute scale. If they answered on an absolute scale, that would sound to me like either the inability to follow directions, the inability to comprehend directions compounded with the inability to recognize the inability to comprehend, or the inability to comprehend directions compounded with a lack of asking for clarification, all of which sound like incompetent behaviors to me.