crabfoot

KenW3 recently commented (how to get access ) newcomers don't ask the right questions - they can't, because they have no idea where they are on the road to progress. This blog post hopes to help you find some answers for yourself.

On Experienced People, it is common to find that someone has made a reference to a site or technique without explicitly linking to a web page on the subject. This may be because the link out would be seen as an endorsement, or because they want to set the scene for their subsequent comments.

One of the first things a noob has to learn is to use a websearch to gain understanding of those terms which fall into the conversation. It is incredibly irritating when one sends a message to a noob suggesting a way forward, and a reply comes immediately back saying that they "don't understand, can you elucidate?" - especially when there's an article in Wikipedia on the subject!

So many people use search engines without being aware that there are "advanced search terms" that they can use to improve their search results. The most useful advanced search facility is to use double quotes (") around a phrase to indicate that you want to search for the exact phrase within the quotes. If you search for
"advanced search terms"
you get a different result set from that given by a search for
advanced search terms
and a lot of the time this is enough to sharpen your search results sufficiently to get the understanding needed. Some search engines allow the use of the logical Boolean operators, AND, NOT, OR which can allow you sharpen your results still further. For example a search for
"advanced search terms" AND yahoo
gives you yet another set of results which is different from the two searches above.

There are lots of other things to learn about searching - here's a deliberately broken link that can be cut and pasted into a browser for repair by a noob -

google.com/support/websearch/bin/static.py?hl=en&page=guide.cs&guide=1221265&answer =136861&rd=1

Those are your clues on searching, Mr Nooby. You can spend days learning from the search results about something that someone drops int the conversation around EP.
If you get an appreciation of a subject for yourself, you can come back and ask meaningful questions.

Remember that the most valuable asset of the person you ask for info is their time. A lot of people on EP charge over 50 cents or a dollar a MINUTE if they are working as paid consultants. They are EP members because they want to talk to people that DON'T clutter the conversation with "fluff comments" and have skillsets that are complimentary to their own. Most don't mind giving something in the way of advice to a noob, but they learned what they know the hard way. They make money. One can't expect to ask them to give up hard-earned knowledge to get someone else on the fast track to becoming a competitor.

Especially when all the info needed to succeed is out there on the web, waiting to be searched for ...