The Art of Googling

Inspired by this article from localghost.dev, I've decided to write mine but with a twist. In this article, I'll be outlining some tips for improving your googling skills and also share the things that I've googled in the past week as a Software Engineer. This should be interesting right let's find out!

Google serves as a large database for every information you need in the world. You can find anything on there regardless if it is related to tech or not. In our case, I'll be focusing on the tech aspect of this topic. I have been a developer now for almost 3 years and one thing that I know is that I don't know everything. As a developer in my daily work life, I tend to seek answers from Google, I look up how to write a specific syntax or even check the meaning of an array. This information is available to me and it is normal to look up things I'm not certain of or seek help if I encounter a bug. One of the key skills you need as a developer is the ability to effectively search for a solution to a problem or error.

Helpful Tips For Improving Your Googling Skills

• Using the wildcard asterisk (*): This is a recent trick I learned when searching for answers with a specific error. You can copy the entire error to google search and get a few results related because you added some keys specific to your app. But to get the best results, you can edit that and add the asterisk wildcard to your search and this will improve your result and give you precise answers to what you need.

• Using a specific domain: Adding a specific domain can also help you refine your result when searching on google. If you know the specific site to search i.e Stack Overflow. You can append the site name site: sitename to your search so it returns results only from that site.

• Use Good Keywords: Finding results tailored to your search depends on what kind of keyword you use. When searching, include a keyword that is closely related to the problem you are searching (e.g JavaScript, Array Methods, etc).

• Search for Titles using intitle, Text using intext: You can refine your search to only return texts or titles from a specific site. This will help drill down the result to return exactly what you're searching for. When searching for title you can use intitle as a prefix and intext: for text in the body of the site.

What I Googled in the Past Week

Now that I have covered some tips to help you improve your googling skills, I'll now share some terms I googled in the past week.

Monday

• Filter an Array with JavaScript - I was working on a chore and needed to see how the filter method works
• Free Screen Recording software - I needed this badly
• What does Egwuenu stand for (I honestly don't know what happened here)

Tuesday

• Nano-degree Scholarship - thought of the possibility of getting one and lost interest when I saw the price
• Take a screenshot on Mac
• Center a div with Grid

Wednesday

• Amazon Logo SVG
• Minify SVG - Trying to reduce the size of an SVG image
• Deploy Nuxt to Azure - looking up an article I wrote
• Undo a git commit

Thursday

• Add breakpoint Visual Studio Code
• Azure subscription disabled - trying to figure out why my azure app was down
• Clearing errors for expo ios - I was having issues with react native app
• Embed open collective backers

Friday

• Adding Data to a React Native App
• Debugging React Native App
• Virtualized List: Missing keys for items
• Grid with React Native - checking if this was a thing with React Native
• Gridsome docs

Conclusion

The idea for writing this is to show you that not every developer is a 10x engineer. We all look up and Google things at one point or the other and I also read somewhere that it's better to know what and how to Google than to spend time cramming. I can tell you I know what googling skills can do for you in your career once you master that art but I'll let you figure it out yourself and you will be glad you did.

Closing this article with a meme I found on Google (get it? 😉)

Originally Published on my blog