googling tips?

John Heim jheim at math.wisc.edu
Thu May 4 09:50:36 EDT 2006


I'm wondering if anyone would be interested in sharing googling tips. For 
instance, when I'm trying to use a tool I've never used before, I google 
for "tutorial OR howto <whatever>".

For example, this weekend, I was trying to figure out rsync, so I googled 
for "tutorial OR howto rsync". Note that the "OR" is in capitals. That 
tells google to use it as a logical operator rather than as a search term. 
So google will look for documents with either 'tutorial' or 'howto' and the 
word 'rsync'.

But I'm thinking other people might have little tricks they use to find 
stuff on google.

Actually, another great tip is just to use google.  I always google before 
asking a question here. First of all, it saves time for the readers of this 
list. But secondly, you often get more complete answers via google. People 
have taken the time to document a lot of these things because of google. In 
other words, people create docs so that other people can find them with 
google. Naturally, those documents tend to be more complete than what 
someone would type in in response to an email question.





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