The search


I received another call from my public last night -- Tasha forwarded yet another "Ask the A.V. Club" question about an unknown piece of music. And I spent most of the evening finding the answer.

My success (to be immortalized in a future column) isn't a tribute to my musical knowledge, which is average to poor. It's a testimony to my mad search skillz. (And also to my stubborn pride). Which brings me to my subject for the day. Since the Internet revolution brought all relevant knowledge to our laptops, I've noticed a singular inability among many of my students to actually find what they need to know. Again and again I hear "There's no information on that subject -- I looked!"

The truth is that they're not looking correctly. I suspect that when the first page of results for their first stab at a search comes up empty, they jump to the conclusion that the Internet is barren. Apparently no one has taught them how to search. It seems so intuitive -- type words in a box, hit "submit" -- what's to know?

So without further ado, here are my tips for fruitful Internet searching:

1. If at first you don't succeed, adjust your search terms. My perusal of Sitemeter's referring pages list confirms how many people still think Google is Ask Jeeves. "When did Craighead County vote on being a dry county?" isn't likely to bring up the date as the "I'm Feeling Lucky" result. How about trying "craighead county alcohol vote" or even just "craighead county wet history"? It might take a dozen tries if what you're looking for isn't one of the internet's leading obsessions. Keep at it.

1a. Quotation marks. A surprising number of my students don't know about enclosing word-for-word phrases in quotation marks. This simple trick can really keep your results from being diluted and return more relevant links at the top.

2. Follow the breadcrumbs. If you find a page that has some similarities to the information you're looking for, use the terms that page uses as new search terms. Follow links to any pages it cites as sources. If it mentions a book, see if you can use Google Books or Amazon Search Inside to get to the information you need. When the trail peters out, back up to the last group of links and follow the next one -- just like I used to exhaust my Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books.

3. Gather the clues. For this last search I had two pieces of data about where this music has been used. I used one piece to identify the artist, but couldn't get anywhere on the name of the song. So I returned to square one with my new information, and went down the avenue of the second datum, now able to search more specifically in that area. The Internet is not a straight line, and most interesting questions have more than one facet. Play detective, and keep a notebook.

4. Don't lose focus. In my students' cases, there's a tendency to see related information much more prominently than the answers they started out looking for. They e-mail me plaintively: "There's nothing on x, can I change my topic to y?" They could learn something from the parameters of "Ask the A.V. Club"; close doesn't count. Because I don't have a choice about the question I'm asked, I have to keep going on it no matter what. And I find a lot more answers than I would if I were able to stop with the more accessible information. Which brings me to my last, related point:

5. Don't give up. Two or three hours of intensive search isn't unusual to find the answer to one of these questions -- and I might end up combining information from eight or nine different sources that offer pieces of the puzzle. How long have you searched? If you haven't tried a half-dozen combinations of search terms, if you haven't drilled down through a half-dozen pages of search results, if you haven't followed the footnotes and citations beyond the internet if need be, don't ask to change yet. Every single time a student has told me they couldn't find anything -- I ended up sending them links in a matter of minutes.

Posted: Tue - May 8, 2007 at 07:59 PM         |

©