🔍 2 Tips on Googling Effectively

Welcome to the first issue of the Software Mastery newsletter.

In this issue, I want to share two tips about how to search effectively on Google.

Googling is a fundamental skill for software engineers, so much so that it’s a meme:

Engineers use Google for various reasons:

1. They forgot how to do something in a particular programming language.

2. They want to understand an error they’re seeing.

3. They need to learn about some engineering concepts.

Googling is a way to find resources, but ultimately, whether we’re able to find what we’re looking for depends on our search query. 

Sometimes, the resource we’re looking for is out there, but Google isn’t ranking it highly enough in the search results for us to see it.

To refine a search query, here are two tips to get started:

1. Use the site: operator to restrict results to a particular site.

2. Use the after: operator to filter outdated results.