The art of googling
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Inspired by this article from localghost.dev, I’ve decided to write my own, but with a twist. In this article, I’ll be outlining some tips for improving your googling skills and also sharing 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 three years, and one thing that I know is that I don’t know everything. In my daily work life as a developer, I tend to seek answers from Google. I use Google to look up how to write a specific syntax or even to 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 related results 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, which will improve your results and give you the precise answers to what you need.
- Using a specific domain: Adding a specific domain can also help you to refine your results when searching on Google. If you know a specific site to search (e.g., Stack Overflow), you can append the site name
site: sitenameto your search so that it returns results only from that site.
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Using good keywords: Finding results tailored to your search depends on what kinds of keywords you use. When searching, include a keyword that is closely related to the problem you are searching (e.g., JavaScript, Array Methods, etc).
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Searching 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 results to return exactly what you’re searching for. When searching for a title, you can use
intitle:as a prefix andintext: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 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 a 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 another, 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 what I know googling skills can do for you in your career once you master the art, but I’ll let you figure it out for yourself. You will be glad that you did.
Closing this article with a meme I found on Google (get it? 😉).
