Good Morning! I know it has been about a month since I posted but it has been busy. Please forgive me! Today I really want to talk about the powers I have gained from college and have honed in this bootcamp. It’s the power of being a Google super user.

I’m sure you are thinking “Psh, I know how to Google”. Cool. Good for you. I’m here to tell you, you can Google better. So let’s dive into this.

Honing Your Power Over Google

So you are googling (as a verb) a problem you are having with your program. You really aren’t sure what the real problem is so you are just typing in a pretty vague problem and not getting back the results you want or need. This brings me to my first point.

Using Keywords

Keywords are very important. They will point you toward the answer almost always. If you don’t know what the keyword is you may have to do several Google searches to kind of get an idea of what other people are using and start using a common word between them as the keyword. However, nothing annoys me more than when I see one of MY keywords marked out under a post. That is Google’s way of saying here is a site with everything except that word.

Google has something built in to combat that though. Let me introduce you to ‘allintext:’ and ‘intext:’.

intext:

When you are Googling and you only want the posts that contain a single keyword in the text of the page you use ‘intext:’. So for instance, if I was looking for a post on base64 images I might put in Google’s search field “Save images in database intext:base64”. This will only give me posts that have ‘base64’ in the text.

allintext:

Does the same thing but it looks for multiple keywords after the command “allintext:”. I don’t recommend using this for your entire search parameter but only for the specific keywords you are searching for.

If you don’t know keywords

Don’t know a word but know the phrase around it? Wildcards (represented by the ‘*’ symbol) are are used for filling in the blanks. For instance we all know the childs game “Who stole the cookie from the cookie jar” but let’s say you can’t remember the word “cookie”. So in the search bar you could put “Who stole the * from the * jar”. Google will fill in the blanks for you with the search results.

Okay, but who forgets the word ‘cookie’. This can be used when looking for programming solutions to. Lets use my example from earlier. If I didn’t know what base64 was and had never heard of it I could just type in “save images in database using *”. This could give me a bunch of junk or it could give me a clue towards base64.

Exclusion

If you know you are looking up something specific and Google keeps giving you a random post from Stack Overflow using a totally different programming language there is a solution to that. Using the ‘-‘ before a word will remove all results with that term in it. So for instance, if I wanted to know how to use base64 in vue and not php I might search “decode base64 vue -php” and that will simply remove any php result.

Site Specific

Search results can also be made site specific. Let say you hate all answers you have found on laracasts and you really want answers from stackoverflow. Adding “site:stackoverflow.com” to the end of your search will bring back Stack Overflow results. Voila!

But Wait, There’s More

So using some powerful tools in googles search box isn’t enough. You have to really know how to parse through the data at a glance. I can go through several search results in a minute and see if there is anything worth investigating in it. This however has come from a lot of practice on sifting through useless data. So this will come more naturally over time.

Here are my last tips.

  • Never go past the first page of search results, if it isn’t in the first page, refine and rephrase the search.
  • Don’t forget to look for common keywords on the way and include them in your next search.
  • If it you can’t find what your are looking for in the results, look in the videos and images. You’d be surprised how many answers I have found by checking the videos or in the middle of all the images.

## In Conclusion

In conclusion, I suggest using all the things I’ve put in this blog. I gaurantee that they work, and I know this because I made it through a lot of college using Google and not text books and have made it through all of this bootcamp with Google too. If that isn’t a good track record, I don’t know what is.

Alright, thats enough out of me folks. So y’all be good now, ya hear, and remember, be careful out among them English.