How-to-Google

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General

  • Keep the Google search as simple as possible only being specific where necessary
  • Gradually add search terms, if you do not get good results
  • Try to search with professional terms, instead of natural speaking language
  • Only use important words, instead of full sentences
  • Use descriptive words and simply rephrase searches, if no good results show up
  • Use quotes around your search words "search words", to tell Google to match exactly the text within quotes, asterisks * can be used as wildcards to match any text
  • Use hyphens <ambiguous search> -<one matching field> to explicitly tell Google to exclude words from the search

Dealing with Error Messages

  • Just copy the error message as it is from the command line to the Google search bar
  • Remove system specific details like
  • the hostname
  • the system or cluster name
  • user or account names
  • Path names: remove (site-specific) path names (like /shared/apps/MyApplicationName/), but keep system file names (eg. /usr/lib64/lib...) and relative pathes inside the software (eg. lib/x86_64/lib...)
    (for example: /shared/apps/myApplicationName/lib/x86_64/libSubModule.so)