Hi everyone,

I can't remember if this has been discussed as a separate issue before. I have this nagging feeling it has been, but I can't find it.

There are many of you here that are expert Googlers and constantly amaze me in finding stuff. What is the procedure you use to weed through the garbage and find the substantive content that you're looking for? My GF was trying to find articles discussing the creative process and also critical commentary of Bob Dylan lyrics and she asked me for help with google. This got me thinking about general search fu methods.

Here's my general approach:

Try to think of phrases that are likely to appear in the content you're looking for, and include them in the search as a quote delimited exact phrase. This is a difficult skill to teach people. Any ideas on how to proceduralize this?

Repeat the search using synonyms.

Iteratively add keywords to reduce the solution space.

Include -"buy now" and -cart in the search to eliminate the commerce sites.

Another skill I've had trouble teaching (probably because I can't describe it well) is the ability to very quickly scan results and see what is likely a good quality hit. If you've ever watched an internet novice, they will put a single non-specific word into google, then click on each result including those that are obviously (to a sophisticated searcher) garbage. How do you describe and teach the ability to ignore junk results without spending much time on them, or even visiting the page?

What else does Master-level Google-Fu include?

Didn't I ask all of this once before? I must be getting old and senile...

Jim