Have you ever given thought to how much time is spent searching Google for a specific subject or item? How many times have you tried to find a golden nugget of information only to come up short wondering if your using the wrong wording or maybe Googles just broken right now?
Now imagine you see a picture of a building and you want to know the phone number of the office occupied by the unseen person taking the picture. Sound impossible? Actually it’s not if you know the correct steps involved. As an entrepreneur starting out Im sure the sound of saving time at every opportunity is a good one.
I had the good fortune to attend a talk given by Dan Russell the Űber Tech Lead at Google’s Search Quality & User Experience Research. His background includes a PhD in artificial intelligence but he moved away from that because “I wanted to learn how to enhance human intelligence.”
He now is the primary instructor at the Power Searching with Google Academy. This is a free online course that teaches people to how to search more efficiently and effectively for information however granular it may seem. What I soon came to realize was what they actually teach is the skill of saving years of time over the course of one’s life.
His talk centered around eight key skills that search experts use when they dive in to the Google search pool. What he explained was that an effective search depends primarily upon using the correct language. All too often we try to type in a search using our own language and expect a computer to understand exactly what we’re saying. Truth be told, a computer is actually a very stupid machine and only operates on the commands it’s given, (at least until Google starts cranking out their A.I.’s that know our feelings by our expressions.)
It’s far too long for me to explain in a blog post but some of the key skills include:
-Knowing which tools to use and when.
-Understanding the terms, concepts, and genre for your search.
-Knowing how to use different media types in a search.
-Knowing what’s possible to ask.
-Using multiple resources.
While the thought of taking out time now to do an online course may seem like asking a bit too much, I can guarantee that the time invested now will save you exponentially more down the road. I will be enrolling in their free program very soon and hope that you will as well. If they could only teach me how to get back all the time I wasted on previous searches, well then that’s when I start shelling out the bucks.
Good advice. Steven Covey called this "sharpening the saw" in 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Would love to see a series of posts about your bullet points above.
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