kutamaya

Last week, a friend asked me to translate a short excerpt containing the principles of the Indonesian banking system from Bahasa Indonesia into English. She e-mailed me the text and then she called me and told me that she needed it in one hour. I took a look at it and said: ""No problem. You'll get it in 15 minutes.""

After we hung up, it occurred to me that there might be an English version of this excerpt and I might not need to translate it for her. So I went to Google, typed in the English title for the excerpt and voila! I immediately called her. I couldn't help laughing as I told her how easy it was for me to translate the stuff. Then I told her to check it out on Google so that she would not have to wait for my e-mail to get to her inbox.

The search engine is a very powerful tool when it comes to getting information quickly. However, there are basic and advanced techniques that you need to master if you want to get to the right website as fast as possible.

The techniques, of course, depend on the type of information that you want to find. I will use personal experiences to show you the techniques that I usually use. Keep in mind that my techniques are still far from perfect. I just know that not everyone is familiar with even the most basic techniques of using a search engine.

Begin with a strategy

As every information-hunting trainer will tell you, you have to start by thinking of a strategy. Using just any keyword that comes to mind will not always take you to the information that you are after. You will usually have to narrow your search by adding more words to your keyword.

Here is a real-life example. Another good friend of mine was contacted by a headhunter. After some discussion, he was asked to let them know how much he was earning at his current job. He asked me whether he should reveal the true figure or mark it up slightly so that he could get a better salary should he decide to jump ship.

I did not have an answer for his question, as no one has ever hunted my head so far. However, I knew he could find a lot of good advice on the Internet. I thought of a phrase that would call up all the documents on the Web that would let him know what to do. I said to him, ""Why not use Google and search for 'how to deal with headhunters?'""

To check whether or not I had given him a bad suggestion, I tried it myself at home. To my surprise, the first item on the list matched the keywords I gave him, word for word. There were many other sites that my friend could also browse for suggestions.

Then, I thought, ""Why not add 'salary issues' to further narrow the search?"" The resulting list contained a ""dos and don'ts"" item that would give him exactly the advice that he needed. And it was there for free!

Use quotation marks

I am not a native speaker of English and I am very bad at memorizing new phrases and words. I rely on the search engine a lot when I write. Here is an example: Earlier in this article there is the phrase ""jump ship"". Now let me tell you how I came to use that phrase.

I wanted to say ""change job"" in a more elegant way and I vaguely remembered that there was a phrase ""jump boat"". I was not sure whether it was the right idiomatic expression so I used Google to find out. I typed in ""jump boat"" in the keyword box.

Note that this time I put the two words inside quotation marks. What these marks did was tell the search engine that I wanted documents that contained these two words in precisely the same order and without being separated by another word. Without the quotation marks, I would have gotten numerous documents that contained the two words in random order. In addition, the two words might also have appeared in different parts of the same document. So using quotation marks is the first technique that you should remember.

This time, the search confirmed that ""jump boat"" was not the right expression for ""change job"". I then looked for another word that was somehow related to the word ""boat"". I thought of ""ship"", so I tried ""jump ship"", again using the quotation marks. This time it was clear that I had found the right expression.

Use wild cards

Remember the days when we still worked in DOS, the computer operating system that existed long before the Windows era? We used the wild cards almost all the time. It turns out that we can also use them in Google.

I use wild cards especially when I am not sure which preposition to use. English is a terrible language when it comes to prepositions, and that is because it is a living language with a lot of sloppy speakers and writers responsible for the chaos. So, to ensure that ""conform"" should go with ""to"" and not with ""with"", I would use the following keywords ""to conform *"" to confirm this. For a non-native speaker, this can be a bit difficult as English also has ""to comply with"".

Finally, do you say ""on daily basis"" or ""on a daily basis""? Try ""on daily basis"" as the keywords in Google and you will find a long list of documents that contain these three words. However, if you enter ""on * daily basis"" as the keywords, you will know that the latter is the more common usage.