Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

Temby t1_iwz0qxn wrote

I'm not sure if there's training, it's just something I picked up over too many years on the internet.

At the most basic level, you want to use all relevant key words. Lets say you needed find what year the Barcelona Olympics was held. You wouldn't just google "Olympics", you could google both words. Maybe you would even google "Barcelona Olympics Year".

Now lets say you needed to know what year the movie "Taxi Driver" was released. What would you search for?

2

Truetree9999 OP t1_iwz12sw wrote

"Taxi Driver movie release year" ?

2

Temby t1_iwz1gaf wrote

>Taxi Driver movie release year

I copy/pasted that into Google and it told me the year, so I'd say that's perfect :)

​

So besides throwing key words at google, here's a few more advanced points.

Firstly, quotes. There is a difference between Googling

Taxi Driver

and

"Taxi Driver"

When you put quotes around a word of a phrase, Google will only return that EXACT match. If you don't use quotes, Google will often try to substitute words with other words of a similar meaning. So use quotes when you know exactly what you want, or you have an exact phrase you want to match!

​

Secondly, you can use the word "OR" to allow Google to use multiple different words. So you could Google:

"Chocolate OR Vanilla" cake

And it will return you both results for chocolate cake and vanilla cake.

2

Truetree9999 OP t1_iwz1nrm wrote

Yup do you use AWS?

Theres a lot of this stuff w AWS cloudwatch that I do for work

2

Temby t1_iwz2qh1 wrote

Sadly not, AWS has the largest market share and is great to know, but I worked for large corporate and government clients where Azure was the only technology they used.

FYI, using quotes is very useful when you have an error message. 99% of the time you want to search for the 'exact' error and you don't want Google to give you any partial/unrelated matches.

Tip 3: Google's date filter. Lets say a recent vendor hotfix broke something. Filter your google results to the last week or month. With the amount of buggy patches MS release, that one came in handy sometimes.

1