{"id":517,"date":"2012-07-02T10:03:18","date_gmt":"2012-07-02T14:03:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.changinglanes.biz\/?p=517"},"modified":"2016-04-30T01:28:25","modified_gmt":"2016-04-30T05:28:25","slug":"success-when-searching-the-internet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.changinglanes.biz\/index.php\/2012\/07\/02\/success-when-searching-the-internet\/","title":{"rendered":"Success when Searching the Internet"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>About once a week I am asked by someone to find some sort of information, product, or service.\u00a0 I usually have a good success rate of returning exactly what they are looking for or better. Which, I suspect (not really) is why I keep getting asked to find things. I don&#8217;t mind helping out when and where I can but to help my clients, friends and family (and myself) move forward in life, a little education is necessary.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m almost always successful when I search for something on the Internet because of:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>I use a quality search engine.<\/strong>\u00a0 I almost always use Google.com to start my search. Out of all the search engines I have ever tried, I always come back to Google. It will consistently return quality results. Even their mission as a company is to organize the world for easy searching!<\/li>\n<li><strong>I ask the right questions<\/strong>.\u00a0 The easiest thing to do is ask Google a descriptive question. I describe what I am looking for in my question. If I am trying to figure out what a Granola Bar is called, I would ask something like &#8220;What is an oat and chocolate snack?&#8221; First result, a page talking about Granola Bars.<\/li>\n<li>If my first question doesn&#8217;t provide any answers, I <strong>rephrase the question<\/strong>, &#8220;what is a crunchy oat snack bar called?&#8221; First result, a page talking about Granola Bars.<\/li>\n<li>Or you can say a <strong>descriptive statement<\/strong>. &#8220;Crunchy oat snack bar&#8221; First result, a page talking about Granola Bars.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Both ways have the main points<\/strong> of what I am looking for.\u00a0 Also known as keywords. So for this question, &#8220;what is a crunchy oat snack bar called?&#8221; the keywords would be &#8220;crunchy&#8221;, &#8220;oat&#8221;, &#8220;snack&#8221;. First result, a page talking about Granola Bars. While either way will give you the same or pretty much the same results, posing your descriptive keywords as a question can help you visualize exactly what you are looking for, as if you are asking an actual person.<\/li>\n<li>The last thing is <strong>I never look more than 2 pages deep<\/strong> on the search results. Really if the first 10 results don&#8217;t have an answer, I try asking my question or phrasing my statement a different way. Maybe being even more descriptive.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The next step is refining how you ask your question, figuring out your <em><strong>power words<\/strong><\/em>. Lets say I&#8217;m having an issue with a certain piece of software, such as Internet Explorer 9. It isn&#8217;t displaying my web site background properly. My power word is &#8220;Internet Explorer 9&#8221; because that is where the issue is happening. Having that power word will narrow down the results because it is? That&#8217;s right descriptive. Then it is followed by my question, well in this case a statement. &#8220;Internet Explorer 9 doesn&#8217;t display two backgrounds&#8221;. If that doesn&#8217;t provide any results, I rephrase till it does. But if I didn&#8217;t have that power word I would just be searching for &#8220;doesn&#8217;t display two backgrounds&#8221; (or maybe &#8220;browser doesn&#8217;t display two backgrounds&#8221;). With the power word I get back 2.2million results, without it, 52 million. The better my power word and the more descriptive\/detailed my question\/statement, the better the results will be. &#8220;Internet Explorer 9 doesn&#8217;t display two css backgrounds&#8221; will return 1.3 million. Just from one more word that describes the problem even more.<\/p>\n<p>The chances of finding a solution to my problem are even better now, even though there are less results. The results are more accurate. So a little creativity and detail when it comes your questions or statements can go a long way when it comes to finding what you want on the Internet.\u00a0 Trust me, you can find anything. Just describe it!<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>About once a week I am asked by someone to find some sort of information, product, or service.\u00a0 I usually have a good success rate of returning exactly what they are looking for or better. Which, I suspect (not really) is why I keep getting asked to find things. I don&#8217;t mind helping out when [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-517","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal-improvement"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.changinglanes.biz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/517","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.changinglanes.biz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.changinglanes.biz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.changinglanes.biz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.changinglanes.biz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=517"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.changinglanes.biz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/517\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3255,"href":"https:\/\/www.changinglanes.biz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/517\/revisions\/3255"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.changinglanes.biz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.changinglanes.biz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.changinglanes.biz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}