What do you do when you have a question?
You Google it.
And you’re not alone in the search.
It’s estimated that there are 63,000 Google searches performed every second, cumulating in nearly 2 trillion each year!
Since 1998, engineers in Menlo Park have been refining the code that powers the most popular search engine in the world.
Hummingbird, Panda, Penguin, and many more unnamed algorithm updates have improved Google’s ability to fetch the information we need with lightning speed and uncanny accuracy.
Google’s mission statement reads, “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
That’s not an easy task. Like our universe, the internet appears to be expanding an increasing rate.
In the past 20 years the number of websites have grown exponentially reaching about 1.6 billion in 2018.
Content on the web continues to multiple as well.
Blogs on WordPress alone publish approximately 2.75 million new blog posts (like this one) every single day!
Finding the information you need can be a productivity drain
We all rely on the internet to provide information we need to get our work done. But some answers come easier than others.
In other words, 1 full day of work is wasted each week looking for information.
This time includes searching through company emails, slide decks, spreadsheets, and other internal documents. Browsing the internet is just one piece of the pie.
But if you’ve ever needed to quickly find something online, you know firsthand how easy it can be to get bogged down or off track as you relentless skim one article after another.
Learning how to search the internet effectively is worth your time
Time is our most valuable resource. Once it’s gone, we never get it back.
Learning how to search the internet effectively is one of the highest leverage skills you can have.
Information is cheap. Real value comes from what you do with it.
In the remainder of this post I want to share some of the best ways to refine your search for information online.
The internet is a big place. Google has done a great job making it accessible.
But here’s what you need to know when you can’t find what you need on the first page results.
3 ways to improve your Google search
There are many ways to refine your Google search to find what you need faster.
But I think these three are the most useful.
1. Search a specific website using “site:”
This trick is great for when you are looking for information on a website you already know and trust.
Using Google to search a specific website is usually much faster than navigating to the website in question and using their native search function.
For example, if I wanted to find the top articles written by James Clear on the topic of goals, I would search the following:
site:jamesclear.com goals
2. Find similar websites using “related:”
One of my favorite clothing brands is Outlier.nyc
They’re a functional clothing company that specializes in using high performing fabrics.
Using Google’s “related:” search function is one way for me to find other clothing companies that fill this fashion niche.
related:outlier.nyc
3. Remove unrelated search words using “-“
You can exclude words from your search by subtracting it from your keyword.
If your original search returns a lot of unrelated articles, using this trick can be really helpful to focus your results.
Even more ways to search Google
There are many more ways to refine your Google search. I personally don’t bother with anything more advanced than the three I just mentioned. But if you’re curious to learn more, here are a few good resources:
- Google Tips and Tricks
- Mastering Google Search Operators in 67 Easy Steps
- Google Search Operators: The Complete List (42 Advanced Operators)
Going beyond Google
I think it’s a mistake to rely on Google for everything. Depending on the type of question you have, other resources online sometimes do a better job of answering you question.
Use Wolfram Alpha for quick computations
Wolfram Alpha was saved as a permanent shortcut on my desktop when I struggled through 4 years of calculus in college.
Now that I’m no longer solving triple integrals, I visit Wolfram Alpha less often, but it’s still my go-to for any challenging calculation.
Here are some examples of the type of questions Wolfram Alpha can help you answer…
Money and Finance
- Calculate the market capitalization of the Auto Industry sector
- Compute the future value of an investment
- Compute an adjustable rate mortgage
- Get US income tax data for a specified AGI
- See even more Money and Finance examples
History
- Compute the current value of a historical quantity of US money
- Construct a timeline of events
- Get information about a past political leader
- Find the inventors of notable inventions
- See even more History examples
Statistics
- Compute a confidence interval for a population mean
- Compute the probability of an event
- Compute the standard deviation
- Calculate basic descriptive statistics for a dataset
- See even more Statistics examples
The best feature of Wolfram Alpha is that it simply gives you the answer. There’s no need to scan through articles to find what you need. It’s all right there in front of you.
It’s worth your time to familiarize yourself with all the different types of questions Wolfram Alpha is best at answering.
If you want to learn even more about what you can do with Wolfram Alpha, here are a few good articles to check out:
- 32 Tricks You Can Do With Wolfram Alpha, The Most Useful Site In The History Of The Internet
- The Best Ways to Use Wolfram|Alpha in Real Life
- 10 Amazing Uses for Wolfram Alpha
Information is a commodity
Richard Feynman was a genius and polymath who contributed greatly to the study of theoretical physics, mathematics, and science.
From his book, “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” we get a glimpse of a man who understood that the application of knowledge is much more important than the facts themselves.
When it came time for me to give my talk on the subject, I started off by drawing an outline of the cat and began to name the various muscles. The other students in the class interrupt me: “We know all that!” “Oh,” I say, “you do? Then no wonder I can catch up with you so fast after you’ve had four years of biology.” They had wasted all their time memorizing stuff like that, when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes.
Information is a commodity. Facts are cheap.
Our real value stems from our ability to organize the facts and synthesize them into a workable solution. Time spent hunting for data is a waste.
The internet is a fantastic resource, but only if we know how to use it effectively.
My hope is that you learned a trick or two here that will help you find what you need online a little bit faster, so that you can spend more time focused on the work that really matters.
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