Findz
Everybody searches all day and almost nobody was ever taught how. The gap between a person who finds the answer in four minutes and a person who gives up after forty has very littl
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Everybody searches all day and almost nobody was ever taught how. The gap between a person who finds the answer in four minutes and a person who gives up after forty has very little to do with the tools they used.
Watch two people look for the same thing and you will see the difference straight away. One types a few words, glances at what comes back, types roughly the same words again with a bit more frustration in them, and concludes that the answer is not out there. The other stops, sits back, and asks a question first: what am I actually trying to establish, and who would have written it down? That second person is not smarter. They are doing a different activity. Searching, done properly, is a craft with moves and habits, and like any craft it can be learned by an ordinary person in an ordinary afternoon.
The reason nobody teaches it is that it looks like it needs no teaching. A box appears, you type into the box, results arrive. The interface is so accommodating that it hides the fact that you are making half a dozen decisions with every attempt: which words, at what level of specificity, aimed at which kind of document, held to which standard of proof. Get those decisions wrong and no amount of clever typing will rescue you. Get them right and the search is often trivially short, which is precisely why skilled finders make it look like luck.
Before you blame the tool, check whether the thing you typed was ever answerable in the form you typed it.
The most reliable rule of thumb in the whole craft, and the least known.
A search box matches text, but what you want is almost never a piece of text.