This comes from the saying “Either you can give a man a fish and feed him for a day, or you can teach a man to fish and feed him for a lifetime.”

Teaching you how to search will feed you and your mind for a lifetime.

I have been in many situations where people come to me and ask me questions that can be simply answered by searching for it. I remember when I was being interviewed in college I was asked, “What would you do if you did not know the answer to something?” The typical person would answer, “Ask my supervisor?” but if you know how to solve most issues on your own then you know how to search for the solutions. I responded with “Google it”, and that answer helped me land a very good job at the time.

The reality is that most of your questions can be searched for; and the most important skill that a person can have is to know how to find the proper answers.

When I was in college I read a book called Google Hacking for Penetration Testers

This book was published in 2005, and gave me an upper hand above most people in my major. While many people in my major couldn’t even built a website, I was extracting contact information for key people in industries I wanted to get in to. I actually sat in my class and showed my teacher how a security hole in our network allowed me to pull up social security numbers of students sitting in the class from Google search results.

There are a lot of tools out there that people can use to find good creditable information. A lot of these tools though will make your search inquires change from a shotgun to a sniper rifle allowing you to target what you are searching for with a lot better accuracy.

1. One of my MOST favorite things to use on Google is the advance operators, when you use these, you will figure out hundreds of ways to focus your search inquires:
   http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators.html
   

1. Google Scholar Search, you can search books, abstracts, articles, now even patents: http://scholar.google.com/
   

1. Froogle Its still on www.froogle.com but its Google’s product search engine. People call me all the time and say “Joey, is this a good computer to buy?” Instead of asking me, just “Froogle” the model number and you will know the average cost. From here, you can figure out if the price you are paying is really a good deal or a rip off.

1. Google Labs – http://www.googlelabs.com/ is a place that has grown so much since its initial launch. Google Labs tends to have a lot of the new projects that Google is working on. This is where you will find a lot of things before they are launched publicly.

After you have learned some of the more advance things you can do in Google, you will find that you can pull up some interesting information. Here are some examples:

Type in Google: site:gov filetype:pdf secret

This would tell google to search .gov websites (government websites) for PDF documents containing the word Secret. Maybe you will find information on UFOs, you never know.

Another fun one,

Type in google: site:edu filetype:xls “SSN”

This tells it, any edu (education) websites, that have an xls (excel document) extension, that has the keyword SSN (social security number) in it.

These are some of the more “malicious” ways of searching, but I like to use it sometimes for things like site:yourwebsite.com and I like to see how the search engines are crawling your website. These are things I will discuss in other articles, but knowing the advance operators allows you to do some very good research and find data you are looking for faster.

Learning to search for the information you need to know or have questions about is very important. Also knowing when to believe what you read is very important as well. Here are some other websites that are good to have written down as credible sources to learn things at.

Sometimes you want to make sure it has source links or citations just to verify the information:

http://www.wikipedia.org/ – Everyone uses this one

http://answers.yahoo.com/ – Good to find or get answers to questions

http://snopes.com/ – Best website to question a myth or email that comes in

http://www.howstuffworks.com/ – Great to find out the real how to on something

http://www.ehow.com/ – has some pretty good articles

Hopefully you spend a little bit of time doing some research on how to properly search. This is the most important thing I personally have learned that has allowed me to find out all kinds of new things. By learning new things, you may discover a new way for you to help yourself or others solve problems.