Since the last US president, „fake news“ becomes a common wording. But for sure, to forward the wrong information is happened since human being. To find out the truth is most of the time not so easy. For me the sentence most of the time is working „If it sounds so beautiful that it can hardly be true, it is usually not true at all“. On other information, my way to find out the truth is to check different platforms, where I can get this information. In this case, I can compare different meanings and side of views and so I can build my own meaning.
Now to the next topic on our list. Most of us use Google to search the internet, but back to point 4 of my blog (security on the internet), you should know that all your search terms are stored and evaluated. These search terms are also related to you and reflect your interests. If you don’t want this, you can use duckduckgo.com or similar search engines without tracking function.
During my research for this text I also found some useful websites like https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/google-advanced-search-tips. But there are certainly many more.
There are some small hints for better results, such as combining more words for better results. As I know, AND does not have to be written between these words. If more text with spaces is entered in the search field, these entries will automatically be ANDed. It is not only on the internet that I need to find some information. In my mail program, I don’t use many subfolders anymore. The search function with the same boolean combinations is much more efficient for me. I also use the same topology to search for some documents on my PC. Especially the wildcard function with „*“ is often used by me. If I know the name, but not the program I used for this info, I use the name.* or vice versa *.doc, if I only know that this should be a Word document. All these search functions are very helpful to me. Since Win-7 this search function now also works by pressing the Windows key and entering the keyword in the search field. In my case, I also use this function to start programs, just by entering the name. If any Apple user reads this blog, yes, on Mac you have a similar function by pressing the CMD+spacebar. So these are some of the many words you can write about the search. This function will become more and more important as the volume of data we receive every day increases.
