]]> http://lowbrowevents.com/2010/08/where-ive-been/feed/ 0 http://lowbrowevents.com/2010/07/the-art-of-google-fu/ http://lowbrowevents.com/2010/07/the-art-of-google-fu/#comments Wed, 07 Jul 2010 04:07:33 +0000 Ang http://lowbrowevents.com/?p=264 How did people plan weddings before the internet?  Seriously, what would take hours of trolling through phone books and industry magazines a few years ago, you can now do in 30 minutes.  But even with all this convenience at our fingertips, sometimes it’s virtually impossible to find what you’re looking for.  You start out looking for Egyptian Cotton sheets and end up on sites talking about breath ability in underwear gussets  Some people have it figured out.  You know, those people you IM saying “OMG I saw these shoes and can’t find them anywhere!”, then they find them in like 2 seconds?  And not only that but they find you a coupon?  Or asking “What was that quote from that movie that we saw at that party with that guy with the thing on his face?”, and they can totally find it and give you a video clip of the movie?  Yet you’re having a hard time finding what the weather is going to be tomorrow, much less use Google to plan a wedding.

Well this is what I’m here for, I am going to teach you to harness the Google-Fu, (with special reports on Craigslist, Ebay and Etsy to follow).  Google-fu is a mystical force, but once you get the gist of it you’ll be able to find almost anything.  Of course there are other search engines, just like there are other brands of self-adhesive bandages, but we call them all Band-Aids.  (Yay for branding!)  For the most part they’re all the same.

Details are not your friend

OK so when you write things in a search engine, usually you type in what you’re thinking.  As in “What does the internal cooking temperature of chicken need to be so its safe to eat?”  Now some of those words Google throws out right away because Google is big and important, and spits on tiny words.  Like “the” “as” “in” etc.  So already our search looks like “What does the internal cooking temperature of chicken need to be so its safe to eat?”

Now the next thing is, Google is kind of OCD.  When you give it a lot of words, it’s going to do it’s damndest to find all those words.  They might not be event remotely connected to each other, but Google’s priority is finding every single one of them.  It doesn’t know what words are important to you, once it sorts out the riff raff, all the rest of the words are equal to Google, like a checklist of words to find.  To break it down a bit more, we’re going to stick them in alphabetical order: chicken |cooking |does |eat |internal |its |need |safe |temperature| what. So you could get to a blog where some guy is complaining about being sick.  “My temperature is like 102, I can’t eat anything, just stuck in bed watching some psycho on a cooking show butcher a chicken. Is this what internal hemorrhaging feels like?”  Then in the comments their friend says “That does sound like it sucks.  You need to let me know when its safe to come over.”  Wait a minute, that doesn’t help you at all!

To get the best keywords you need to do three things.  Choose “focus words”, use common sense and remember that Google is a giant popularity contest.  The more something is searched for, the more likely it’s going to turn up in your searches.  The focus words are the ones we’re going to say “Google come back with these words or I’ll stab you with an ice pick!”  So here are the big words :  “cooking chicken safe internal temperature”.  That’s still a lot of wordage, lets see if we can narrow it down a bit more.  This is where the common sense comes from.  Obviously Google isn’t going to broadcast unsafe temperatures for chicken, so there goes “safe”.  No one measures chicken temperature from the outside, so you can get rid of “internal” too.  This is both a popularity and a common sense thing, since far more people cook chickens then raise them, you don’t need “cooking” either.  Which leaves us with “chicken temperature”.

Go ahead and try it, I’ll wait.  Yeah that’s right we went from 16 words to 2.  TWO!!!  I know this example is kind of obvious, but when looking for wedding supplies it’ll save you from a lot of frustration and dead ends.

Except for when they are

Now Google is what is known as a “Boolean Search”, which is named after some mathematician guy who basically invented system of sorting things by process of logic and blah de blah.  All this means to you, is you can give Google commands to narrow stuff down, or add to the search.  So say you were looking for some red sparkly heels, ala’ Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz.  Now you can look for “red glitter shoes” and you’re going to get red shoes that have glitter on them.  But you’re not going to get red rhinestone shoes, and those are sparkly and you might like those even better.  So you would put “red glitter OR rhinestone shoes”, which would bring up red glitter shoes and red rhinestone shoes.

Now what if we were going to go a bit further?  You want some heels, and a strap. (Yes you could just say “heels” instead of “shoes”, but I’m trying to illustrate a point here)  So we bring in the AND command (You can also use the + sign), to get “red glitter OR rhinestone +heels +strap”.  You’re going out of your way to say “Hey Google, there better be a heel with a strap in there when you get back to me!”

A problem arises because a bunch of places sell strappy sandals (Google is pretty good with tense and looks at the root word which gives you stuff you might have missed otherwise).  We don’t want those, so we pull out the NOT command.  (If you laughed to yourself at yelling out “NOT!” don’t feel bad, I did too, you can also use the – sign)  By using “red glitter OR rhinestone +heels +strap -sandals” Google knows where you’re flexible, what you want to make sure is included, and what you want nothing to do with.  The likelihood of finding your dream shoes has exploded by a billionty.  Roughly…

The Thesaurus IS your friend

One of the big problems people run into when searching is that we just have too many words for things in general.  Throw technical terms, regional dialects, and a hundred other factors in there, and there’s some good stuff we’re missing out on.  If you’re looking for “spotted baby cat” the sites that say “calico kittens”, aren’t going to come up.  So although it might take extra time, try and do multiple versions of the same search.  Like if you’re looking for large quantities of flowers for bouquets, you can look up flowers, florals, florist, bouquet, botanics, botanical, and that’s just for the plant part.  While trying to explain that you want a lot of them, you could use wholesale, bulk, lots, gross, quantity, and mass.  If you’re looking for a light, delicate undershirt, you have a choice between “cami” and “camisole”.  Where you were raised can dictate if you’re looking for a “T shirt” or a “Tee Shirt”.

If you’re looking for a specific color, it’s always hard because people use fancy-pants colors like “crimson”, “scarlet” or “ruby” instead of “red”.  Or, instead of having the name of the color there at all they’ll come up with some adjective that denotes the emotional facsimile of color, like “Brooding” for black or “Vixen” for red.  That is because these people are either a) stupid and don’t know how to sell things through the internet or b) they have enough word of mouth or advertising traffic coming in from other sources that you should know what you’re supposed to say.  Like when you go into Starbucks you know you don’t ask for a “large” you get the “venti”.  (I had to Google that because I’m not a high maintenance coffee person, I do hot chocolate through good ol’ blue collar Dunkin’ Donuts thank you.)

Acronyms also make searching tricky.  What UNH means to me is the University of New Hampshire, the largest local college, while if you’re a brainy type, to you it might mean Uranium Nitrate Hexahydrate.  But people in the know usually use the acronyms more often then the full phrase for convenience purposes.  My suggestion is to start with the acronym and make sure to use a modifier.  If I was looking for the first UNH I might say “UNH Wildcats” (Their mascot), if I was looking for the second one, I would say “UNH radiation”.  That way it’s much more likely that our search will turn up what we’re looking for, and we won’t miss out on the places that don’t write everything out.
The art of Google fu is large and complicated and we’ll cover more of it later.  Now go relax your brain for a bit then find things that were earlier unfindable…