I have a confession to make: it positively drives me up the wall when people continually ask me questions or to fix something or do something that they could easily do themselves if they'd looked it up on google. With the exception of my mother (because she's my mother, she has inbuilt biological overrides on my irritation circuits), people who constantly and repeatedly need me to hold their hand or tell them how to do very simple things make serious dents in my estimation of their intelligence. People who aren't prepared to think for themselves and try to find their own answers first* do not get a large slice of my patience.

* Caveat: people who come to me already having tried and failed to find an answer for themselves get endless patience. Failing is not a problem. Failing to try is.

Even more flabberghasting are the people who come to writing masterclasses who clearly haven't done the slightest bit of research about their intended profession. They've no idea what agents are, how copyright works, how to send their book to a publisher. I genuinely do not understand how someone could consider going in to a certain field or profession and not at least do some cursory research on it. How could you sit there, knowing your own ignorance on something that's important to you, and not attempt to rectify it?

I thought it was mostly the previous generation's aversion to the internet - and I can understand that. I remember the days before mobile phones and internet (just), and the technological world moves faster and faster each year. If you weren't born with wifi embedded in your skull like generation Y it can be very hard to keep up, and turning to a blank webpage that's supposed to magically answer your question is not a natural instinct. But I've been dealing with people of my generation and younger lately who do this all the time. We're building something with software X, and every ten minutes they'll come and ask me how to do task A, B, C or F with it. And I look at them and think what the hell do you do when you're by yourself and you want to know something?

Unfortunately I'm technically their manager, so it's not very professional for me to use the snarky answer I used to give my students: google is your friend. But I wish I could. Somewhere along the way, we're forgetting to teach people to think for themselves, and we've failed completely to teach them that they should.

I have observered however that there's a skill to googling things. There must be, because I've watched parents, friends, bosses, minions and students consistently fail to find anything useful on google, and quite often come up with the least reputable site results possible. So I thought if I explained a little of how the magic ouiji page works, people would find it easier to help themselves when they need answers. 

How to use google more effectively

There are billions of web pages out there. Some of them have useful information, some of them have propoganda, some of them have porn, gambling and cheap drug sales.  They're all out there, like a houses in an enormous city. 

Google has a phone directory for the city - they've sent out thousands of little robots (called 'web spiders') that look at each and every webpage and record what's in it. They don't record the whole webpage, because a map that's as big as the city it's mapping would be useless. Instead, they look at what words appear commonly in the text (ignoring things like 'the, an, a' etc) and use that to determine what the page is 'about'. They summarise each page by creating a little spreadsheet of each non-structural word and its frequency. (To those in the know: I know I'm oversimplifying, the finer detail really isn't the point, here.)

So google has a giant directory that tells it what each page is 'about'. When you type in a search query, it matches up the words in your query with its directory and tries to find the pages that have the words you used. Now, there's a little bit of extra processing - for example, words like 'write', 'writing', 'writer' and 'written' are so similar semantically that google considers them to be effectively the same word, and queries for 'writing' often return results for writers, written or write. It also does a little bit of magic to weed out pages that aren't useful (for example, pages that just copy other websites, pages that list lots of keywords without any actual content, etc), pages that haven't been updated in ten years, and pages that nobody links to (implying they're not a respected resource) but the end result is a list of pages that contain words from your search query. Any pages that have your search query phrase - that is, the words in the exact order you wrote them - will be given priority. 

Armed with this knowledge, it's much easier to write queries that will return useful results: you need to think not from the point of view of your question, but from the point of view of the answer you're looking for.  For a page to be (probably) useful to you, what words does it need to contain - ie, what is it talking about? How should that be phrased?

For example, a while ago I had a large number of PDF documents that needed to be refactored, paginated, sectioned and combined into one document. As I'm already skilled in InDesign, I was hoping I could use it to do the job, but I wasn't sure if InDesign could handle PDFs in the right way to do that. If I imagined the page I wanted as an answer, the most important words it would have had would be: PDF, InDesign, Edit, and probably also page numbers. So that's the start of my query.

However, I also knew that InDesign could be used to add page numbers to InDesign files, and this was most likely a more common procedure (meaning more web pages would be talking about that than talking about editing PDF files). Google can't really do semantics - it's purely a word-match and numbers game. Which means that if I added the term 'page numbers' to my query, because of the sheer numbers I'd be more likely to get pages talking about creating PDFs from InDesign files (after adding page numbers) than editing PDFs directly. A different semantic notion from the one I wanted, and one that google can't  separate intelligently - we have to use the right search combination to do it ourselves. So - better to keep it to PDF, Edit and InDesign.

This can be a difficult balancing act, especially if you're searching for something that you're not very knowledgable on. The general rule is that if a search term is making the query more specific and narrow (for example, from 'PDF' to 'Edit PDF' - that's more specific about PDFs) then it's probably going to be helpful. But if it's looking for related, but not more specific information (editing and adding page numbers are related concepts, but not necessarily more specific - as they mean very similar things, you'd use one or the other, but not both) then the term may actually send the query off in the wrong direction. It's best to use as few search terms as possible, and choose them carefully. 

Think of it like a venn diagram: using two circles that overlap a little is useful. But if you're using two circles where one circle is completely inside the other, then one of those circles isn't useful.

It generally works better if you can construct a phrase that you'd like to see in the answer (see above re: google gives priority to exact phrase matches)  - like "How to edit PDF files with InDesign", or "Can I edit PDF files in InDesign". If you have a specific how-to, or can-I question, posing the query as a question will almost certainly get you decent results, because of the how-to wikis and question-answer sites out there. 

It does take practise, but with time you'll learn intuitively what makes for a good search query and what doesn't. And then you're no longer reliant on your son / husband / daughter / wife / neighbour's kid for how to do things or fix things. Just don't tell everyone else that you know how to do it, or they'll all start coming to you.