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A Book Review by Deane Lappin | |
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Title: How to google, The Ultimate Guide to finding everything! Author and Publisher: Niklas Göke (Dec. 24, 2014) Kindle Price: $9.99 Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc ASIN: B00RG2NZPC Level: Beginner through advanced Overall Rating: 2.5 out of 5 Apples Date: Jan. 26, 2015 Reviewer: Deane Lappin |
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Niklas Goeke, the author of "How to google, The Ultimate Guide to finding everything!" (sic) writes about personal growth at niklasgoeke.com. He says that leaving your comfort zone will lead to great improvements in health, wealth, love and happiness and he offers a free newsletter to help you accomplish this ( join his free newsletter). He begins his treatise by introducing himself: "Hey there! I'm Nik, 23, and a German student on his way to becoming an entrepreneur - and happy. Nik's happiness, as measured by his enthusiasm for his topic, is evident as is the fact that English is not his primary language. For this reader, his frequent grammatical errors and awkward constructions were distracting and begged for the services of an editor. Some of his errors are idiosyncratic, as for example his odd decision about which words to capitalize in his book title. Some are oversights, as in his failure to define technical words, such as meme and url hack, and acronyms in a book intended for both beginners and advanced users. He tells us, for example, that although his Dad "knows his way around ebay, email, excel, SAP, power point, and even some VBA" he nevertheless called Nik for help in solving a computer-related problem. Other errors are linguistic. He writes that the desired output of a Google search is "an information" and he awkwardly defines the "art of focus" as "narrowing down what the list of results Google returns to you as much as possible." An editor might also have toned down some of the author's hyperbole. While the ability to filter information is clearly useful, it doesn't necessarily follow, as Nik claims, that "googling is the skill of the century," and that following his guide will allow you to find what you are looking for 99% of the time because "You can google ANYTHING". But he gets high marks for his enthusiasm, his wish to be helpful to his readers, and the organization of his material. The book is divided into steps; the first for beginners, the second for both beginners and advanced users, and the third for advanced users. He tells us that parts 2 and 3 "should not be read in order," by which I assume he means that they need not be. Step 1 teaches how to find good keywords by abstracting or generalizing from a question. Then we are shown how to rephrase, which is "the art of picking the version or synonym of your keyword most relevant to the context you are searching it in." Finally, we can abstract by inferring, which creates focus, which he says is the ultimate skill of googling. "More focus = less searches." Nik defines transitive relations, noting "If you're a nerd like me, you will LOVE this" and he provides this example: Therefore, if we are looking for an academic paper (X) and academic papers are always in pdf format (Y), that means we need to search for pdf files (Z!) "Boom," he says. "Tell me you don't feel like Sherlock Holmes right now!" I didn't. Unless Holmes was the guy scratching his head and saying, "Huh". On the other hand, learning that Google ignores almost all punctuation, spelling, and grammar was a useful tidbit. In Step 2, we learn to use Google's built-in features. Nik has created a comprehensive list of Google shortcuts. He divides these into 15 sections, beginning with weather, time and dates and ending with organizing, biology, and random tidbits. Each category is explored and each ends with a section called, "What also works." Aside from clearly illustrating how many unnecessary words can be eliminated (for example, type in a flight number and you'll get updated current info), what I mostly learned from this section is that Google can provide lots of answers to questions I will never ask (like, "solve pythagorean theorem). Nik provides a "secret tip" that is useful for finding more shortcuts. When the result of your search contains information from Wikipedia or another source on the right, look for all the bold terms. You can usually enter them in combination with your original keyword to immediately get the information as a short cut. In Step 3, we are introduced to advanced search operators, which the author says are "Google commands for pros" because they put constraints on a Google search and thus "create focus." He introduces four platforms, Google Scholar, Google Shopping, Google Patents, and Google Images. He talks about some of the ways in which each can be used but fails to say how to launch a platform and he doesn't define what platforms and sub-engines are. He devotes several pages to using search tools to search for images. He begins with a statement that clearly amused him: "Of course, you can not only trace images backwards, but also find images right off the bat. But hey, it's 2014, who am I telling this. Jokes aside, the information about search tools is excellent. He explores in detail the tabs underneath the search bar - Web, Images, News, Shopping, Videos, More, and Search Tools - each of which contains submenus that can impressively focus your search. For example, under the Search Tools tab, one can see the search results categorized by reading level (basic, intermediate, or advanced), and can limit the search to any of these. The reading level breakdown is also a good indicator of the complexity of your keywords. The more advanced results, the more complex the topic. Other advanced search operators discussed are the dash, quote, underscore, asterisk, two dots, and/or operator, around operator, site operator. link operator, related operator, cache operator, info operator, filetype operator, author operator, intitle operator, inurl operator, intext operator and the inanchor operator. Some of these are intuitive, some seem very useful, and others are perhaps too esoteric for an average googler. For example, Nik's illustration of the "clever use" of -inurl far exceeds my comprehension and, I suspect, that of most readers: "-inurl:(htm/html/php) intitle:"index of" "last modified" "parent directory" description size (mpg/wmv/mp4/mov) "chapelle" is an advanced hack and produces videos of comedian Dave Chapelle. But Nik's goal is to make each of his readers into a "Sherlock Holmes of googling" and so he no doubt has chosen to err on the side of completeness. Or, perhaps he just enjoys showing off his encyclopedic knowledge of the art of googling. Regardless, if you use Google you will definitely learn something from this comprehensive manual. |
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Intrepid Book Reviewer: Deane Lappin |
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