Here, let me google that for you
You may have stumbled across the aforementioned website, where a link to the results of a google search is sent to someone in response to a question, like “what is a Red Giant?”.
Perhaps you discovered it as the brunt of someone’s ill-humoured joke, or maybe you are one of the sniggering intellectual snobs who just can’t wait for such an opportunity to belittle someone else.
You can probably guess my point of view on this, but for the sake of impartiality, it must be said that there are a few special individuals who genuinely do use lmgtfy.com to help their fellow humans find the answer that they’re looking for.
Google’s mission to organise the world’s information plus their unsurpassed contextual language technology makes googling an experience that we definitely all take for granted. If somebody told Einstein, Newton, Aristotle, or Plato that humans would have this tool, they’d lose their minds. All the answers anyone has ever come up with, in 0.098 seconds, in your pocket? At least we can all agree, we should probably be googling more.
It’s worth recognising, however, that googling is an art. It’s not difficult, it just takes relentless curiosity. Newton and the boys would have loved it because they spent their lives asking questions. At 42courses we love it because we believe in curiosity. Sometimes, it just takes a mental shift when looking for the solution to any question or problem, so remember this:
Realise that someone, somewhere has asked your question before and someone, somewhere else probably had the answer, first type the question as you would in it's simplist form (e.g. "What is 10x content")
Realise that you can literally ask google anything. (Except, perhaps the phrase in the image above)
If at first you don't succeed try again and again and again (this is search, not skydiving). Use some of these helpful search hints, for example using key words instead of full sentences in your search.
When it's not so easy, however, you may need to dig a little deeper. Most of us are able to find the nearest pizza place or the the name of that song whose lyrics go "we're so happy, yeah we're so happy!" but what about when we need to search for statistics that show diverse teams perform better than teams where all the members are the same? That's not easy. So what do you do? This article, with search insights from students and researchers, can help you there.
Googling can lead you to amazing places, and if you’ve ever tumbled down a rabbit hole of opening a hundred new tabs, you’ll understand the joy of pursuing a vein of interest in the gold mine that is the internet.
It's a wondrous place for learning. All you need is curiosity, and maybe sometimes a little nudge in the right direction.
(Needless to say, if you want to learn about a whole range of exciting, modern topics from real world experts in a fun, bite-sized way that points you down the right roads of the internet, you know where to go.)
