I borrowed Daniel M. Russell’s 2019 book The Joy of Search (A Google Insider’s Guide to Going Beyond the Basics) from my friendly, local public library and greatly enjoyed reading it. His book is a fascinating collection of stories that give you a whole set of tools and a helpful attitude for conducting research. Dan also writes the SearchReSearch blog. There is a web site for the book, and you can download a sample of Chapter 2. You also can look in it online at Google Books. The twenty chapter titles from this book are:
1] Introduction: How You Can Harness the Power of Online Research – Why You Should Improve Your Online Researching Skills
2] Finding a Mysterious Location Somewhere in the World: How to Use Multiple Information Sources to Zero In on a Resource
3] Do Lakes in Africa Sometimes Explode? How to Focus Your Search with “site:” and Using Specialized Terms
4] Things You Notice While Traveling: How and When to Switch Search Modes to Find Information
5] Is That Plant Poisonous or Not? How to Find Highly Localized and Domain-Specific Information
6] What’s the Most Likely Way You’ll Die? How to Be Explicit about What You’re Searching to Find (and Why That Matters)
7] When Would You Want to Read the Italian Wikipedia? How to Look for Information from Other Languages in Wikipedia and Other Sources
8] Why Are the Coasts So Different? How to Use Online Maps Resources to Answer Broad Geographic Questions
9] Mysterious Mission Stars: How to Read Snippets in the Search Results and Pay Attention to Search Details
10] When Was Oil First Discovered in California? How to Discover and Work Through Multiple Competing Claims in Online Resources
11] Can You Die from Apoplexy or Rose Catarrh? How to Find (and Use) Old, Sometimes-Archaic or Obsolete Terminology
12] What’s That Wreck Just Offshore? How to Find Archival Imagery and Use Metadata from Photographs
13] Do Flies Have the Pattern of a Spider on Their Wings? How to Check the Credibility of a Resource You’ve Found
14] What’s the Connection Between “The Star-Spangled Banner” and the General Who Burned the White House? How to Search for Vaguely Remembered Connections Between Ideas
15] What Causes the Barren Zones around Some Plants? How to Know When You Should Go Offline and Do Research in the Real World
16] Is Abyssinia the Same as Eritrea? How to Find Additional Context Information for Your Research
17] The Mystery of the Parrotfish, or Where Does That White Sand Really Come From? How to Triangulate Multiple Sources to Find a Definitive Answer
18] Did Perry Ever Visit the Island of Delos? How to Follow a Long Chain of References to the Ultimate Answer
19] On Being a Great Searcher: Rules of Thumb for Asking Great Questions
20]The Future of Online Search: Why the Research Skills You Learn Today Will Continue to Be Useful in the Future
It isn’t perfect. Dan omits or has incomplete descriptions of some very useful items. In Chapter 3 he mentions using “site:” but not the Google Advanced Search page that has it as one of the options. I blogged about that web page on July 6, 2010 in a post titled Web search tactic: Use the Google Advanced (Helpful) Search screen. Chapter 3 also talks about using specialized terms. One good way to find them is in your public library databases such as EBSCOHost. I discussed those on February 24, 2015 in a lengthy blog post titled How to do a better job of speech research than the average Toastmaster (by using your friendly local public and state university libraries). Once you have found a specialized term, you can look for other articles via the subject index.
He mentions using “cached:” to find versions of web pages up to six months old, and then the Internet Archive (but not the specific page called the Wayback Machine).
When he discusses whether you can die from apoplexy in Chapter 11, he never mentions the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed abstracts database or the PubMed Central (PMC) database with full text of millions of medical articles. For example, apoplexy is discussed in a 2020 article by Axel Karenberg in Neurological Research and Practice titled Historic review: select chapters of a history of stroke. On February 16, 2021 I blogged about PMC in a post titled Giving an effective medical lecture.
In Chapter 18 he mentions Worldcat only in connection with Google Books. Back on February 28, 2012 I blogged about 40.5 years of WorldCat – a great tool for digging up books, magazine articles, etc.
Dan points out that not everything can be found online for free via Google. Google Scholar won’t lead you to all the magazine articles on a topic. In a post on February 4, 2019 titled Reliable places to find information for your speeches I mentioned Web of Science as one of the preferred online places to look when using one of the public terminals at the Boise State University Library.
In my previous post on April 24, 2021 titled What percent of internet browser users know how to find text within a web page I linked to an hour-long YouTube video at MIT Press about Dan’s book, which you might prefer to watch, if you don’t have time to read it.
An image of a 1912 motorist’s tool roll came from Wikimedia Commons.
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