yowkee essential

Nobody could know everything. I got the same feeling/experience as Jeremy and Kasia. I agree with his perception of “knowledge worker” in 90s, and we have more or less achieved that with the Web and of course, the search engines. That actually means the knowledge isn’t well organized, instead, it is accessible because of good work of Google, Altavista, Alltheweb, Yahoo…etc (did Yahoo’s initial categorized web into directories still working? How often did people searching information through web directory now?)

I was too feeling guilty sometimes as giving credit of solving some problems. Without actually good at the particular problem, I was just able to effectively search the web —- most of the time, google. Or more specifically, Google groups, which previously known as dejanews, store and indexing all newsgroup posts. I used to found google groups more helpful on searching technical information. Take for example, I was searching for Microsoft Global IME for NT4 for my chinese typing in office PC this morning. I got the feel that M$ is either too dump in organizing its sites, or else it’s purposely being unfriendly to Google. It’s difficult to get what you want on Microsoft, no matter you try to be specific or general. Failed to get it on web search, I found easily some other’s similar experience by turning to search on newsgroup. That’s what great of Google groups.

Nevertheless, you need to get experience for being skillful or effective to search. Being more senior position in my department, I found freshies can’t really judge what they’ve gotten from google. Or, they don’t know what to search. Take the other example, fresh VB developer could only scratch their head while facing some weird Windows development problem. Without knowledge of Windows API and how it really works under the hood, they can’t really analyze the searching result. Here’s the experience came into picture.

So is it enough by just knowing how to search? Nope. It’d never be, your knowledge foundation and analysis morph into something called searching know how. Not everybody looks the same in front of search engine. So, Kasia, you shouldn’t feel guilty over that. :)