My “Day I Left Pennsylvania” led me to some archived website posts (before blogs were invented) I had written many years ago. I’m re-posting them now. Bear in mind that most of the content in this series is over 5 years old. I have left the content more or less intact. I have removed some links and added some others — but that’s it. Enjoy!

Being able to find information effectively has become a lot easier since Google has improved their search engines, but there was once a time when you had to use crazy pedantics to find stuff you wanted. Some of the techniques still apply.

Syntax

Syntax is not what you pay when you buy cigarettes, alcohol, or pornography. Syntax is, in layman’s terms, the grammar you use to communicate with the google search engine (in this instance.) This will look a little complicated, but I’ll explain it all, bit by bit.

<modifiers><term 1> <modifiers><term 2>…

Modifiers

What are modifiers? Modifiers, or “qualifiers” are represented by punctuation symbols, but they tell the Google search engine to interpret the following term in a certain way.
For example the quotation marks [" "] are used to tell google that you want the enclosed term to be verbatim. Entering dog pile would find pages that matched ‘dog’ OR ‘pile’. Entering “dog pile” would result in pages that only matched ‘dog pile’. It basically forces the search engine to treat multiple words as one solid term. Continue reading →