November 19, 2008, Vol. 2, Issue 22

Welcome to part two of our two-part newsletter series to help you sharpen your search skills. And while this might take 4-1/2 minutes to read (instead of the typical 3-1/2 minutes), we hope you’ll find the extra 60 seconds will save you millions of seconds in the next year.

Now, to becoming a better a researcher…

Bookmarking saves time.

This is one tool we couldn’t live without. When you’re doing a search and you come across a great site – bookmark it. Those of you new to Redux may not know about our favorite bookmarking site Del.icio.us. It rocks and here’s why: not only can you save and tag your favorite resources, but you can see how many other people like the site as well. It gives you an idea of how many other people find it useful and what tags they’re using. With Del.icio.us you don’t have to have different bookmarks for different computers, just log on and it’s all there waiting for you no matter where you are.

Another bonus with Del.icio.us is that it’s totally searchable so if you tag your sites well, you can always find them again. (And don’t tell us that you haven’t lost a site before. We all have!)

How to find a company or product that is similar to one you know.

Search for, in quotes: “better than _keyword_” or “worse than _keyword_”

Some example results:
Results 1 – 100 of about 23,600 pages for “better than flickr”.
Results 1 – 47 of 47 pages for “better than stumbleupon”.

The results will almost always lead you to discovering alternatives to whatever it is you’re searching for. Using the same concept, you can use this trick to discover new music or movies. For example, ” reminds me of _someband_” or “sounds like _someband_” will pull up artists people have thought sounded similar to the one you typed in. This is also a great way to find good musicians you’ve never heard of, but wish you had.

How to find out about a site.

Google has an ‘info’ search that returns what they know about a certain web page. For instance, info:www.chow.com will show information about the Chow site. Be sure there’s no space between the “info:” and the web page URL.

This is what you get:

CHOW – Recipes, cooking tips, resources, and stories for people …
Recipes, cooking techniques, and news, updated daily. Chow.com – devoted to the pleasure of food and drink.

Google can show you the following information for this URL:

* Show Google’s cache of www.chow.com
* Find web pages that are similar to www.chow.com
* Find web pages that link to www.chow.com
* Find web pages from the site www.chow.com
* Find web pages that contain the term “www.chow.com”

All from one little teeny search. Cool.

Looking for a Range of Information?

You’re going to love this Google trick. Amaze your friends and colleagues with your search acumen. Find information within a range of numbers. For example, [billboard music 2000..2005] will yield links to the Billboard lists for those years. Make sure you include those two little periods between the two numbers. Trés important.

Work Backwards.

Okay, so this is so cool. The Practical Archivist read our last newsletter and wrote to us about a great Google tip. We checked it out and agree that it’d make a super addition to the list. So here goes – courtesy of Sally Jacobs, Saver of Memories:

  • Many folks type their question in the search box. The problem is that the articles you are looking for will have the answer but not the question. It’s possible you will find an FAQ page or two, but most of the answers are written as regular sentences.
  • Solution = Type in the answer you are looking for, not your question.

Here’s an example from her days as Image Research Coordinator for American Girl:

We needed to add some color to a spread in Welcome to Kit’s World, a lavishly illustrated history of life in America during the Great Depression of the 1930s. There was plenty of black and white photography available, but certainly no color photography. My solution was to find a modern color photograph of a vintage 1930s dress…ideally a Ginger Rogers gown. But in order to track that down, I needed to know when Ms. Rogers died.

Here is what I typed into Google (remember, the quotation marks are important)

“Ginger Rogers died on”

What happened? The exact information I wanted came back as the top 5 or 6 results. Multiple sources with the same date were a strong argument for the accuracy of that date. My point here is that searching “when did Ginger Rogers die?” would not have returned these results.

So go forth and search.

And don’t forget we’re here if you need us.
We’ll be back in two weeks. Meantime, Gus is waiting for your questions. There must be something you want to know….