Google Users: "I Can Quit Anytime"
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Google Users: I Can Quit Anytime

I'm not advocating this, but it's an interesting twist on the adage, "You don't know what you've got until it's gone". The author advocates trying to go one day without using Google. This raises an interesting point: do we fall into ruts by using the same search engine and accepting their "best 10 results" ranking? I mean, how many of us click past the first page of results?

There are tons of ways to enhance a Google search, such as using "phonebook:helseth 60091" to find a phone number (no space between the colon and the desired business or person's name), and a fantastic book by O'Reilly of "Google Hacks" (here they use the term, hack, to mean clever ways of getting the most out of the tool, not how to break into Google and do something illegal).

If you're trying to search for something technical, Google may not be the best search engine to use. For example, medical searches should be run on the NIH's user-friendly PubMed. If you type "helseth dl" in the search field, you'll see a listing of 5 of my research publications. Note-some journals aren't indexed by the NIH's library ("outside" the core fields of medical research), but PubMed does a great job of narrowing the search down. A quick and simple way to find something in PubMed is to combine a search term ("breast cancer" for example) with the the word "review" (try "breast cancer AND review"; search engines like it when you capitalize search words with special meaning!). Many major journals will allow public access to articles 6 months or a year after their publication, so you may find useful information this way. If there's something you really want, print out the citation and contact your local public library!

Anyway, I digress.... Try a day "without Google", to see if it makes you a better searcher. Just be sure to try it on a day that you don't really need to get a lot done! Happy searching.
- posted by Larry H @ 10:52 AM