The Ancient and Venerable Art of Google-fu

Originally published: Sat, 23 Jun 2018 07:13:00 +0000

Other titles considered for this post: How Not to Piss Off Entire Forums and Facebook Groups; Avoiding the Banhammer; Stop Being Lazy and Look it Up Yourselves.

Before you can embark on a career in, well, anything even vaguely IT related (or do practically anything), you must master one crucial skill: information searching. In the days of yore, and even rumoured to still exist despite budget cuts, there were in of cult of specialists in this area, who guarded their domains jealously: the librarians. These knowledge-fanatics could divine what you were looking for from the ridiculously poor and mumbled explanation you gave them, then translated that into a secretive code which led you to a shelf in a library, and then to the book you were after. Just like magic.

These days, while librarians are still a vitally important part of cataloguing knowledge, we also have another, less mystical, tool at our fingertips: the Search Engine. Unfortunately, very few people have bothered to learn how to ask these data crawlers for the right information, leaving too much confusion and clogged-up posts asking other people for something a quick search, done properly, would have revealed. This then leads to arguments and admins swinging Banhammers around like an enraged blacksmith.

Which brings us to the point of this post: What is Google-fu? How can it help me?

Put simply, Google-fu is an slang term for being able to use a search engine and get the desired result almost every time. Or magic, for the uninitiated. It's about understanding what you want, knowing how search engines work and matching these things together to get an answer. You might think "I can already do that", but if that was true, you wouldn't keep asking inane questions on forums trying to work out the simplest query.

I'm not going to go into depth about the algorithms that power Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo or others, you can do that yourselves. The basics are quite simple: they use indexes, compiled from SEO data, tags, labels, search descriptions and site metadata, to form a list of results that match to a greater percentage than others, your query terms. Naturally, it gets more complex from there, but that's the gist of it.

In the good old days of the Internet, before the ideas that formed the semantic web (an idea that would bring web searching and other functions together with a form of natural language processing) were considered close to reality, Boolean logic was god. AND, OR, NOT, NOR logic functions were instrumental in finding what you wanted from a search with any reasonable degree of speed or accuracy. Now, while we do have a more responsive search algorithm being used Boolean logic isn't necessary, although it can be helpful, not just in the search itself, but while formulating the search.

Here's the crux of this post: I'm sick of people not looking for things on their own and asking in groups and forums that are for discussions about Cyber Security or IT about simple things a quick search should tell you. I'm beginning to think that not only are these kinds of people lazy, but also ignorant of just how to search.

So, here's my quick guide to getting out of my hair and not getting banhammered:

Step the First: Figure out what you are searching for. Basically, work out what information you are after, then break the search down into terms as specific as you can be. If you are unsure, start with a look on Wikipedia about the topic, that might help narrow it down.

Next Step: Grab a thesaurus. If you are still struggling to find what you need, try to find synonyms that you can use instead of the terms you are using. Try switching the order of words around too.

Step the Third: Information Validation. This can be the trickiest bit, working out which resource is the most reliable. If the information is correct, you can usually corroborate it on another resource. Checking the URL validity is important too: a website ending in .co.uk or .gov is more likely to be reliable, over a URL that ends in .com.uk.tv or other such ridiculousness.

Recommendations from other people can be good, as are company websites. Wikipedia might have a reputation for being an unruly free-for-all, but the citations and references can point you in the right direction. It's also worth getting your head around the concept of bias, as you'll find it almost everywhere, not just in journalism or advertising.

I hope this has helped, if it has, share it around.