Hi.
I don’t think I would spend any more than five minutes searching for a solution online, but let’s say I take two hours to find the solution I need to debug something, or to find certain advice.
How can I search online more efficiently? If I don’t have time to ask anybody questions (for some reason), how would I minimize the amount of times I have to type something into the search bar?
Nice to see you back in the forum @User1 !
This is a difficult question, at least for me, because I believe it depends on what you are needing to find the solution to on what is the shortest amount of times to type into the search bar.
If is it something in fCC, I would suggest searching the News category with a specific word, or combination of words. For example: below is a search result for a search I just did on html in the News category.
It was quit, provides me with many options.
If it is an internet search the quickest way to find what you need, I would suggest is with keyword searching.
These are just my way of searching and trying not to need to keep digging more and more to find what I am looking for, @User1 .
Good question. It depends on what bug/problem you’re trying to solve. I usually do a quick Google search and skim through some stackoverflow solutions. If that fails then probably read some of the longer articles written by developers. If within 5-10 minutes I don’t find a solution I go to ChatGPT. The issue with chatGPT is you have to be very specific with your question and give it some background information so it knows exactly what the problem is. However do note that chatGPT may not have the right solution. I tend to ask ChatGPT to get an overview of what the solution should be and I implement the solution myself.
If you are learning and use ChatGPT I suggest you ask it to explain why it’s doing things the way it does. Afterall, you want to learn why not just ‘here you go, problem solved’ then copy and paste.
Having said that - I sometimes face issues when trying to use a not so well learnt feature e.g. switch/case statements. When I’m not so confident in using it I would take the time to read and learn it - maybe even practise in a codepen before returning to my project and giving it another go.
Over time you’ll pick up the speed of finding solutions quickly. Hope this helps.
The main “trick” I usually advise is to spend most of your time on “your question” or more generally spend the most time formulating your problem in your query.
If the answers you are getting don’t seem related to your problem, then rephrase or re-verify your question to get an idea of what you are doing.
The #1 issue with searching for solutions on the internet is there are infinite many solutions. But odds are your problem is just 1 of many possible problems, if you seek answers without isolating/focusing on what you are asking you can easily be lead astray.
I might go one step further.
As said, a good answer relies on the question and to ask a good question you have to understand the problem as best you can.
If you skip to trying to find the answer before you understand the problem, your question won’t be very good, so neither will the answer.
I think this is similar to what @lasjorg was getting at, but my advice is to google parts of the problem instead of trying to find the solution.
I mean, for things like freeCodeCamp challenges you probably can find the complete solution code online if you really want, but that doesn’t really help you in the future.
One of the skills you’re developing is breaking down a problem and its solution into smaller and smaller parts. This allows you to search for help with the specific part(s) of the solution you are stuck on. Very often that will just mean doing a google to get the correct documentation page with search terms like “sort method, javascript”, googling a specific error you recieve, or posting very specific questions in places like this forum or StackOverflow.
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