Sophisticated Internet Searching

Many people — especially students, I suspect — have noted that the instantaneous availability of information on the internet makes committing things to memory less useful than it used to be. Can’t remember the formula for calculating the hypotenuse of a right triangle? No problem, just Google it.

Edward Tenner, in his book The Efficiency Paradox, suggests that while this may be true, it also means that being able to conduct effective online searches is increasingly important. He writes that the downplaying of rote memorization has not been accompanied by an increased emphasis on internet search skills.

I’m not sure how much that matters. Google’s algorithms have gotten so sophisticated that it usually figures out what people are looking for even if they aren’t particularly adept at searching. But there’s one tip that I’ve repeatedly found helpful. It’s a shortcut for limiting a search to a single site.

If I’m looking for a book review of John Barry’s The Great Influenza that I saw in the New York Times, I could go to the Times web site and use their search engine to find the review, but it’s likely to be faster if I do a Google search that returns hits only from nytimes.com. I can do that using the site operator:

great influenza site:nytimes.com

I can also use the site operator to limit a search to a particular domain. For example, if I wanted to search only government web sites for information about covid-19, I could type:

covid-19 site:.gov

Another useful trick is using a minus sign in front of a word that you want excluded from your search results. One article I read noted that if you were looking for a band to play at your wedding and searched for wedding bands, you’d get mostly results related to wedding rings, since they’re also called “bands.”  But you could filter out those extraneous returns by adding a minus sign and the word “jewelry” to your query:

wedding bands -jewlery

There are several other operators you can use to narrow a search, but you don’t need to memorize them; you can just go to google.com/advanced_search. That page lets you build a highly targeted search by just filling out a form. (It also describes how you could use operators to type the same search directly into the search bar if you wanted to.)

I’ve bookmarked google.com/advanced_search so that I can pull it up quickly the next time my Google search returns a lot of irrelevant results.