Hands up! I\’m Friday, this is a search!
Not the day, the detective.
In lieu of a light, meaningless story about some trivial aspect of my life, I’d thought I’d treat you to something more substantial. I don’t claim to be knowledgable about anything, but I am quick to use new technology to help do the things I want to do, so here’s some of what I know:
- There are tools out there that will help you and tools that won’t.
- Example; you wish to know about the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, a small district in far eastern Russia founded in 1928 as a place for the Soviet Union’s Jews. A Google search will turn up plenty of good information. You are looking for information about a specific, concrete topic, and search engines will be happy to oblige. Here you go, says Google. 414 results.
- But what if you are looking for information about an abstract topic, something like “health care costs”? A Google search on that gives you 2,820,000 hits. Some will be useful, some won’t, and it looks like you’re in for some major sifting. Blleaggh!!, says Google, spewing vomit all over.
- Now, you can probably refine that Google search (here’s a good guide to getting better results out of the vomit pool), but that doesn’t solve the basic problem; you’re looking for a different kind of information than Google provides. You don’t want to know facts and figures and statistics about “health care costs” (the way you did about the Jewish Oblast). You want to find someone who knows a lot about health care and ask them, “Hey, why are health care costs so high?” This is a very different kind of search.
- You want human information on an abstract topic. This doesn’t come from web pages, it comes from people. So you need to find someone who knows what you want to know, and ask them (or at least listen to what they’re saying).
- Fortunately, it’s very easy these days for people to say things on the internet. So the chances are pretty good that there’s a health care expert out there producing content about the health care industry (and probably about health care costs, too). Hey, look, there’s one now!
- Sometimes you’re not searching for facts, you’re searching for sources.
- You can’t go to Google and say, “Find me someone who I can trust and is smart about health care issues.” But, with a little digging, you can go through RSS feeds, evaluate the competence and authority of the sources, and over time, develop a list of people you trust to inform you about that subject.
- Bloglines is a good tool (here’s the part about using technology to help you). Sign up for an account (it’s free), and start subscribing to RSS feeds. Keep these in folders by category (like bookmarks) and check them daily (or hourly). When you want to research a new subject (like health care), set up a new folder for RSS feeds about health care. Then subscribe to as many health care feeds as you can find (here’s a start), so you can begin monitoring the subject and filtering out the feeds that you don’t trust or don’t find useful.
- Use Blogline’s Clips and Blog features to save your research as you go. Every time you find a good post about the subject, clip it or blog it; then you’ll have a running record of your findings that you can easily share with people (like the person who’s paying you to find them).
- Get a good browser: Firefox is my choice. Why? A good browser can increase your productivity online, especially when you’re doing information searches. Searching, by its nature, involves going off on tangents. There are many ways to get to what you’re looking for, and you never know which link will take you. In Internet Explorer, link open in the same window or in new windows. This means either you do a lot of ‘back’ clicking, or you have 27 windows open in your taskbar, with no idea what’s in each one.
Tabbed browsing is a feature common to many decent brosers (i.e. not IE) which allows you to open links in tabs. That way, you can save the Google search you started from in one tab, and go off on tangents in new tabs within the same window.
Firefox also has a ton of other features (like note-taking plugins and bookmarklets) that will make your time online more efficient.
- Find the right search engine. It might not be Google. A9.com, Amazon’s new search site, takes web results from Google and combines them with statistics from Alexa, Search Inside the Book results from Amazon, and reference results from Guru Net.
The point isn’t that there’s just one, best way to find what you need, but that there is technology out there that can vastly improve your results and productivity. And that if you don’t experiment with all the different options, you may be missing something really useful.