The Art of Google Search as a developer
A senior SWE told me programming is mainly learning how to google and find answers by yourself.
Googling sounds easy, right? But then he says junior developer often expect to find the exact answer to the problem like at the back of a textbook and that’s where they struggle.
It’s the ability to generalize what you want to achieve, use that generalization to find similar problems, identify the generalized solutions to those problems, and then reapply the generalized solution back to your specific problem.
It’s a skill of finding similar code and then rethinking how to reapply the concept they learned to their code. That’s where he says is where one builds experience.
It’s the ability to generalize what you want to achieve, use that generalization to find similar problems, identify the generalized solutions to those problems, and then reapply the generalized solution back to your specific problem.
Anyone can type words into a search engine and hit enter.
Most people don’t know what words to type.
Why juniors struggle
Apparently, a lot of new juniors that are self-taught/bootcampers follow step-by-step tutorials and read the answer before trying to solve the program.
Using Google is not just a necessity, but also a skill that should be improved each time you do it.
Here’s how to improve
- Think of a project idea and try to build it from scratch on your own and try to avoid following step by step tutorial to do the same.
- Read official documentation after learning something from video tutorials. It will get increase you grasping power and incolcate the habit of reading technical content and improve the ability find the exact needed things in huge docs.
- Before reaching out to someone for help and submitting a very simple question on stack overflow, use advance search options on google and read documentation.
Google search tips:
1. Use Double Quotation Marks (“ “)
If you want specific search results, use double quotation marks around your query (“”). It will help you to search for an exact phrase.
2. Use the Operators to Exclude a Term from the Search Results
Use ‘ — ‘ operator to exclude particular terms from the results
For example, if you want to search about the best web development courses, but you also want to exclude Django from the search results, use the following format:
Best Backend Development Courses-Django.
3. Use the * operator
This operator will replace the missing word that you’ve forgotten.
For example,
* Object Model in JavaScript
Above search will show results related to ‘Document Object Model in JavaScript’
4. Avoid writing unnecessarily long statements.
Searching the exact relevant keywords will give more efficient results.
For example, instead of searching
How can I add typing effect to the text using JavaScript?
Search
JavaScript text typing effect
5. before: and after: keywords
Use before: and after: keywords to search for a specific date range. This tip is most helpful to search for latest and most updated documentation of any particular technology.
Keywords: before:YYYY-MM-DD, after:FFFF-DD
Example:
python features after: 2022–10-08
6. Use filetype: Keyword
- Get Results in Particular File Type
Example: filetype: pdf
7. Use ‘define:’ keyword to get definition of a Term
- If you want to find definitions of a term, use the define: keyword.
- For example:
define: inheritance in oop
- This search query will show the definitions of inheritance in oop.
8. Use Google Advanced Search
- This is a built-in feature of Google that allows users to find information on Google using a more detailed method.
- It is the one-stop destination if you want to search for something specific while filtering out your results in the best way possible.
Point to remember:
Ultimately, nobody cares how many times you Google something, or how many times you reference the documentation — they only important thing is how you approach the problem and break it down to solve it with best possible approach.
Woah! You made it this far!
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