Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Searching the web

Inspired by [anonymous], I want to teach you people out there how to search the web.

First of all, don't think that you can just go to any kind of search websites, type in anything you like, and expect to find anything you want. That, is wrong. Take for example, you go to Technorati, search for "How does *something* work? What is the theory behind it?", and expect to find information suitable for you school project/assignment. Absurd.

Now, you may be asking what on WWW (Earth) is Technorati. Technorati is a blog search. So, don't expect to find serious stuffs there. This brings me to my first point. Using the right search website. Generally, sites like Yahoo! or Google can do the job. But there are cases where you need to extend your search to other sites like Technorati (for searching the web for one of your friend's secret blog) or Baidu, 百度 (for Chinese stuffs). Now, the misconception of Baidu is that people thinks that its only for songs. Much people did not notice that there is a web search feature on Baidu, I don't see how they can miss that.

Take this situation, someone comes to you on MSN and asks you for a particular Mandarin song. He goes: "Hey! Do you have *something in han4 yu3 pin1 ying1 which he don't even bother to give you which sound it is* by *again some hypy*? I can't find it on Baidu!" And one thing I am going to tell you is to fuck off. Second point: Never on WWW, you can 'survive' on only one search site. Please extend your search to other websites, Baidu is not the monopoly, in fact, none of the sites is a monopoly. Try SoGua or 6621, just to name a few. So, make sure you are 80% confident that you've search each and every possible web pages on WWW before going to someone else. It is just irritating to have someone asking you to find things which you can find it within one minute.

Thirdly, your search. Refer to the first example, "How does *something* work? What is the theory behind it?" I'm sorry, but sad to say, search engines are not humans. Don't go to them and ask it (him) a question and expects it to find you something you want. Search with keywords. It is hard to master, but all I can say is, imagine yourself as a writer of a certain length of text that is on your topic. Think about what special words you would be using in your text, and search for them. Now when I said 'special', I mean words that can reflect directly on the topic of the text. Don't go searching for 'he', 'and', 'or', 'if'. Go die.

Fourth, it doesn't matter how many search engines you use, it will never be enough. Try using Ctrl+F on pages that you think its worth your search. You may just miss something important on a one million worded page. If you want to find song files or other things that may contain an extension, but could only find streaming versions of it, work your way around them. The link to the files you want is hidden in the page. You can retrieve these files by looking at the source code of the page. Works wonders. Nope, don't expect me to spoon feed you on this method, go find out yourself.

Now, stop bugging people to find things for you. You want it, find it yourself.

No comments: