How to Find the Answers to Your Questions

TL;DR:

Brush up on your Google-fu if you aren’t already a wizard.  With the proper search string, you should be able to find the answer to your question within the first couple of search results.

How to be a better Googler:

Googler… that word doesn’t roll off the tongue very well.  Yes, I know you know how to search for things on the internet.  But do you know how to FIND things on the internet?  And I don’t mean finding a company by searching for their name, or finding a movie showing time.  What I mean is, do you know how to ask the search engine a question and get a real answer from it?

If you don’t, then this post is for you.  In our coding lives, we often (if you’re like me, it’s every 5 seconds it seems) need to scour the web to find a single piece of documentation for a method call, or example usage of something we’ve never seen before.  Here are a few tips that I can give you for finding answers more quickly.  They work well for me and I think they will work well for you too.

Be a person of few words:

Use as few words as possible to describe your problem.  Search for the specific parts of your question and avoid filler words.

• Example:
  • Let’s say you needed to know how to add a list item to an unordered list using jQuery.  There are two different approaches you can take:
    1. How can I add a list item to an unordered list with jQuery?
    2. add li jQuery

Anytime I search for things like this, I almost always use the second option.  Why?  It’s much quicker to type, I assume that anyone who is talking about a list item knows the syntax behind it (a li can only be added to an ordered list or an unordered list and I can assume that since they are related, the solution for either one would be similar), and I know that I want to use jQuery to solve the problem, so anything else is irrelevant.  I’ve already weeded out a large portion of search results that aren’t going to answer my question.  Keep in mind that this is a simple example that probably wouldn’t change the search results much either way, but when you get to very specific searches, this type of thinking really matters.

I prefer impatience:

Don’t be afraid to change your search string if you don’t find your answer in the first 3 or 4 results.  It’s been my experience that if the results don’t answer the intended question, I just haven’t phrased that question correctly.  Yes, I know they aren’t technically “questions” but I think you get the drift.  When you do get the question just right, the results should be music to your ears.

Did I mentioned how much I like Stackoverflow.com?

Stackoverflow.com is your best friend as a coder.  Nine times out of ten, the solution to your problem is going to come from there.  However, you don’t want to spend hours looking through hundreds of stackoverflow questions.  Use the methods described above to weed out the circumstantially useless information, and then pick two or three of the stackoverflow results.  Then, skip down to the answers that seem to have the most activity and offer detailed explanations and code snippets.  Even if the situation isn’t EXACTLY the same as the one you’re in, you will learn a lot just from reading someone else’s code and there will probably be enough information there to fill in the gaps you need or give you that one missing method name that you can add into your search string to find the actual answer you need.  Either way, It’s a win-win.

Don’t forget about Youtube either:

While not always as useful as a written work, sometimes a video explanation is what it takes to make a topic click in your head.  Take the same approach to your search string as you would otherwise, and pop that sucker into the youtube search box.  One of the advantages to this is that typically, when someone does a video on something, they are fairly thorough.  You may watch someone else explain something that makes you completely rethink the approach you’re taking and drastically simplify it.  Hey, work smarter, not harder right?

Alright, I think that’s all I’ve got on that.  Let me know what you guys think, either in the comments here or over on the forums.