Googling like a pro

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Tips on googling¶

Google works on the page rank algorithm.
There are signals which determine the quality of a website.
- Page rank is one of the signals.
Every word is useful in the search.

Spelling, punctuation and capitalisation doesn't matter.

Construct more general queries to avoid any biases:
- For example instead of search "is javascript the best programming language" search "what is the most popular programming language".

Using double quotes ("") around any term will force google to match it exactly.
Exclusion using -:
- Example: website tutorial -jquery, we won't get any results consisting of jquery.
Wildcard *:
- Useful when debugging since the error messages that we get might contain directories that are only relevant to us so instead of pasting the whole block of text we can replace it with * to significantly improve the results.
Date operators:
- avatar review before:2010: will return results before 2010.
- some error message after:2021-01-01: will return results after 2021.
- An use case would be python courses after:2021 so that you only get the latest courses.
- If we use both before and after then we can filter between dates.
Getting results from a particular website:
- grpc site:reddit.com
  - It is important to have the full domain name just reddit wouldn't work.
Searching for a specific filetype:
- grpc filetype:pdf
- Similarly we can find txt, epub, png, csv etc.

If a website is down you can still see it using cache:sarthaknarayan.tech

Last updated: 2023-01-10