When I was a very young adult, I spent 6 months working as a researcher at a now defunct company aptly named Find. Find's clients were corporations whose minions could call and ask "What is the market for bubblegum?", or "How does the Palomar Observatory clean it's telescope?"
I answered many questions. Since this was eons before the Internet, this meant I ran around New York City's many public libraries with a bag of nickels to make photocopies. I looked at microfiches by the hundreds. I read directories and books. I found out who the experts were, looked their phone numbers up in the Yellow Pages and called them.
By the end of my stint at Find, I was a crack researcher. Once the Internet was invented, my skills easily translated into being able to science the shit out of pretty much anything.
But most people I encounter in day to day life, not so much.
So I came across a useful article on how to effectively use Google, which I have summarized for you:
1. Use quotation marks to find a specific phrase. When you put quotation marks around a collection of words, it tells Google to look for the words only in that order. As an example, I knew that "science the shit" is an expression that was used in "The Martian" novel and movie, and I used that technique to get the clip that I linked to in this post.
2. Use the minus sign. As an example, a search for for "wedding bands" brings up a ton of results, for both wedding rings and musicians that play at wedding receptions. Think of a word that would appear on all the irrelevant pages — in this case, “jewelry” or “jeweler” — and include it with a minus sign in your search: wedding bands -jewelry. Just like that, you’ve got yourself a bunch of sites that review wedding bands across the country.
3. Narrow your search to a specific time period. You can put a date restriction on search results by clicking the "Tools" button under Google’s search bar, and then clicking the “Any Time” drop-down. You can narrow your results to the previous week, month, year, or a custom time frame.
4. Find the source of a photo with reverse image search. Not all searches are made up of words. Sometimes, it can be handy to know where a certain photo came from, or to find a larger version of it. You probably know you can type a few words to find a photo with Google’s Image Search, but you might not have realized it works in the other direction too: Drag an image into Image Search and Google will find other versions of that photo for you.
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