How Can I Search For What I Want?

As most of us do from time to time, I misplaced my sunglasses the other day. I could not remember the last time I wore them, nor where I might have laid them down. Looking out the front door, I could see by the intensity of the sunlight that I was definitely going to need them. (Yes, I have a spare but I couldn’t find them either.) First place to check was the car. Why I did that I don’t know because it is a scientifically proven fact that what ever you are looking for will be in the last place you look, not the first. (This is a universal law, not a theory.) If only we could figure out what the last place was, it would save hours of fruitless searching. As you already know, no sunglasses in the car.

I stood there trying to think of where they might have been and wishing I could simply Google it. Wait a minute maybe I could Google it. Not literally of course, but why couldn’t I apply the same principles to my search that Google does when someone attempts to search the World Wide Web for a specific topic? For the unwashed out there, Google is an Internet search engine. It contains an index to perhaps ninety percent of the all the Web sites in the world. There are others, Yahoo, Alta Vista, MSNsearch to name a few, but I happen to like Google and it seems others do as well. How do I know that? More and more I overhear people say, “I’ll Google that and see …..” I have yet to hear anyone say, “Let me MSNsearch that a minute.” So off to my virtual Google search I go to see if I can find my sunglasses.

First thing to do is to pick a topic to search. The topic for me was Sunglasses. So I type sunglasses in my mental Google and trillions of hits come back as to where a pair of sunglasses might be found. There are sunglasses in the house, in other peoples houses, in cars, stores etc. So that search was pretty meaningless simply because it was far too wide-ranging. I needed to narrow the field down by setting parameters on my search. Next I tried sunglasses and my home address. Google automatically puts the word “and” between the search terms and so this search limited my results to possible places to look in my house. (now we are getting somewhere) But this is still too broad a search field. The key to finding specific items is to narrow the search as much as possible.

To limit the field even more, I used the minus sign. Google recognizes the minus sign as indicating an excluded item. So, in my case I typed in, sunglasses address –bathrooms, since I had used the facilities earlier and hadn’t seen the sunglasses in the bathroom. So now I had narrowed the search down to the rooms in my house that were not bathrooms. (getting closer) Next I wanted to reduce my search to an even tighter range. I typed in sunglasses address –bathrooms +countertops. Google sees the + sign as a required search string even though it may be considered extraneous (every house has countertops) and normally might not look for that term. The results told me there were only two countertops in my house. Victory was near!

I was so confident, that before I went to look, I actually sat at my computer and went to www.google.com and this time typed in “Happy Days” using quotation marks before and after. Google then considers the words between the quote marks as a complete phase and looks for results with that exact phrase in it. This search brought up the lyrics to the song, exactly what I was looking for. Singing the words to “Happy Days”, it took me only a minute to search both of the countertops in the house. Sure enough, no sunglasses to be found.

What’s the moral of the story? Sometimes you just can’t get what you want.

If you would like to see a specific topic covered, leave a post with your questions. Questions with general appeal will be included in upcoming blog posts.

Many of the topics covered here can also be found in my new book, Grumbles From The Keyboard or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love My Computer. It is available at the website www.grumblesfromthekeyboard.com, amazon.com, barnes and noble or request it from your favorite bookstore.

ISBN numbers are: 

ISBN-13: 978-1467985895
ISBN-10: 1467985899