Gift Egwuenu

Posted on Sep 8, 2019 • Edited on Dec 10, 2019 • Originally published at giftegwuenu.com

The Art of Googling

#productivity

Inspired by this article from localghost.dev, I've decided to write mine but with a twist. In this article, I'll be outlining some tips for improving your googling skills and also share the things that I've googled in the past week as a Software Engineer. This should be interesting right let's find out!

Google serves as a large database for every information you need in the world. You can find anything on there regardless if it is related to tech or not. In our case, I'll be focusing on the tech aspect of this topic. I have been a developer now for almost 3 years and one thing that I know is that I don't know everything. As a developer in my daily work life, I tend to seek answers from Google, I look up how to write a specific syntax or even check the meaning of an array. This information is available to me and it is normal to look up things I'm not certain of or seek help if I encounter a bug. One of the key skills you need as a developer is the ability to effectively search for a solution to a problem or error.

Helpful Tips For Improving Your Googling Skills

Using the wildcard asterisk (*): This is a recent trick I learned when searching for answers with a specific error. You can copy the entire error to google search and get a few results related because you added some keys specific to your app. But to get the best results, you can edit that and add the asterisk wildcard to your search and this will improve your result and give you precise answers to what you need.

Using a specific domain: Adding a specific domain can also help you refine your result when searching on google. If you know the specific site to search i.e Stack Overflow. You can append the site name site: sitename to your search so it returns results only from that site.

Use Good Keywords: Finding results tailored to your search depends on what kind of keyword you use. When searching, include a keyword that is closely related to the problem you are searching (e.g JavaScript, Array Methods, etc).
Search for Titles using intitle, Text using intext: You can refine your search to only return texts or titles from a specific site. This will help drill down the result to return exactly what you're searching for. When searching for title you can use intitle as a prefix and intext: for text in the body of the site.

What I Googled in the Past Week

Now that I have covered some tips to help you improve your googling skills, I'll now share some terms I googled in the past week.

Monday

Filter an Array with JavaScript - I was working on a chore and needed to see how the filter method works
Free Screen Recording software - I needed this badly
What does Egwuenu stand for (I honestly don't know what happened here)

Tuesday

Nano-degree Scholarship - thought of the possibility of getting one and lost interest when I saw the price
Take a screenshot on Mac
Center a div with Grid

Wednesday

Amazon Logo SVG
Minify SVG - Trying to reduce the size of an SVG image
Deploy Nuxt to Azure - looking up an article I wrote
Undo a git commit

Thursday

Add breakpoint Visual Studio Code
Azure subscription disabled - trying to figure out why my azure app was down
Clearing errors for expo ios - I was having issues with react native app
Embed open collective backers

Friday

Adding Data to a React Native App
Debugging React Native App
Virtualized List: Missing keys for items
Grid with React Native - checking if this was a thing with React Native
Gridsome docs

Conclusion

The idea for writing this is to show you that not every developer is a 10x engineer. We all look up and Google things at one point or the other and I also read somewhere that it's better to know what and how to Google than to spend time cramming. I can tell you I know what googling skills can do for you in your career once you master that art but I'll let you figure it out yourself and you will be glad you did.

Closing this article with a meme I found on Google (get it? 😉)

Originally Published on my blog

Top comments (28)

Chris Achard • Sep 8 '19

Nice tips and neat look into what you searched for in a week :)

I definitely agree that "how to google" is a skill that is really important to learn as a developer... properly using keywords to get the right answer is sometimes an art. Thanks for the post!

Gift Egwuenu • Sep 9 '19

Thanks Chris.

Espoir Murhabazi • Sep 9 '19

Good stuff sister!
I like the intext one.

There is another favorite tip I use sometimes which helps to include or exclude a word from the search.

Maybe you can add it, more Infos here

Gift Egwuenu • Sep 10 '19

Thanks Espoir!

Christine Pinto • Sep 10 '19

Thanks for sharing your insights and I definitely agree with your conclusion.
My favourite google search hack is "the – Operator". It is very helpful if a keyword is also used outside of the technology field, for example.

Christian Gröber • Sep 11 '19

I'm seriously considering teaching this stuff to my scout group (I'm a scout leader). Sure, we teach them how to knot properly or how to cook on a fire, but they just can't google, even though that's such an important skill in today's world (My little brother once asked me something, I didn't know the answer so I told him "Google it" and he just typed his question into the searchbar!)

Soo yeah, anyways, thanks a lot, especially for the "intext:" and "site:" tip, that's actually super helpful.

As for the asterisk one, I just always delete any custom names and it works fine.

Gift Egwuenu • Sep 11 '19

Yes do it! I think this is not just meant for only technical folks. Everyone needs to know how to use google.

Erik Vårdal Itland • Sep 22 '19

I wrote a similar post back in August: erik.itland.no/a-few-tricks-for-se...

Added a link to you since I had forgotten to mention / never learned a couple of your tricks (and for what it is worth there are also a few others in my post that aren't mentioned here.)