Getting Organized in the Google Era: How to Get Stuff Out of Your Head, Find It When You Need It, and Get It Done Right

Merrill, Douglas C.; Martin, James A.

ISBN 10: 030771246X ISBN 13: 9780307712462

Verlag: Random House, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

Whether it's a faulty memory, a tendency to multitask, or difficulty managing our time, every one of us has limitations conspiring to keep us from being organized. But, as organizational guru and former Google CIO Douglas C. Merrill points out, it isn't our fault. Our brains simply aren't designed to deal with the pressures and competing demands on our attention in today's fast-paced, information-saturated, digital world. What's more, he says, many of the ways in which our society is structured are outdated, imposing additional chaos that makes us feel stressed, scattered, and disorganized.

But it doesn't have to be this way. Luckily, we have a myriad of amazing new digital tools and technologies at our fingertips to help us manage the strains on our brains and on our lives; the trick is knowing when and how to use them. This is why Merrill, who helped spearhead Google's effort to "organize the world's information," offers a wealth of tips and strategies for how to use these new tools to become more organized, efficient, and successful than ever.

But if you're looking for traditional, rigid, one-size-fits-all strategies for organization, this isn't the book for you. Instead, Merrill draws on his intimate knowledge of how the brain works to help us develop fresh, innovative, and flexible systems of organization tailored to our individual goals, constraints, and lifestyles.

From how to harness the amazing power of search, to how to get the most out of cloud computing, to techniques for filtering through the enormous avalanche of information that assaults us at every turn, to tips for minimizing distractions and better integrating work and life, Getting Organized in the Google Era is chock-full of practical, invaluable, and often counterintuitive advice for anyone who wants to be more organized and productive–and less stressed--in our 21st-century world.


From the Hardcover edition.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

DOUGLAS C. MERRILL, most recently the President of Digital and the COO of New Music for EMI Recorded Music, was the chief information officer at Google until April 2008. Previously, he was a senior vice president at Charles Schwab and Co. and an information scientist at the RAND Corporation. He has a Ph.D in Cognitive Science from Princeton University.



JAMES A MARTIN is a PC World technology blogger, whose articles have appeared in many publications and on web sites including Washingtonpost.com.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 6
Paris, France, or Paris, Vegas? How to Master the Art of Search
 
In this chapter:
Crawling the Web
Getting the Most Relevant Search Results
Your Search Engine Is Also a Calculator
The Small Stuff
Searching Your Computer
 
More than any other technology or innovation, search makes it possible for us to survive and thrive in the information age. Like oxygen, which changes everything it touches, the ability to quickly search computer files, e-mails, calendar entries, databases, and the Web has changed how we store information, how we retrieve it, how we use it. In other words, search has set us free from the clutter of our imperfect minds.

Thanks to search, you no longer have to neatly organize all your information the way you used to, with a place for everything and everything in its place. It’s as if you no longer have to hang up all your clothes. Instead, you can just toss them into an ever-growing pile, and when you want to wear your favorite Nine Inch Nails T-shirt, just ask for it, and it will magically surface to the top of the heap. How freeing.

Over the past ten to fifteen years, computer-assisted search has become an integral part of our lives. It’s evolved from something only academics and scientists could do on their monster computers into something most of us perform instinctively, multiple times daily. We breathe, we blink, we eat, we sleep, we Google.

As a result, most of us haven’t paid much attention to search. In fact, by now we’ve pretty much taken it for granted. But search is actually a skill, one that’s essential to the new organization. The savvier you become at search, the better you can filter out what’s not important and focus on what is. The ability to perform quick, targeted searches helps you find the information you need faster. And you don’t have to expend mental capacity trying to anticipate where to look for a piece of information or trying to figure out where the heck to put it. You just search for what you want, and voilá.

So let’s work on mastering search. In this chapter, I’ll share some strategies and tips for getting the best results to your queries. My focus here is on Google because the majority of people use it.[i] And despite its many competitors, I believe Google, with its streamlined search interface and sophisticated algorithms for delivering the most relevant results, continues to offer the best search engine. (Okay, it doesn’t hurt that I used to work there either.) For ideas about other search engines, see the “Stuff We Love” appendix. That’s where you’ll find a brief guide to the tools and services I’ll talk about in Part II, along with suggestions for alternatives.
 
Crawling the Web
Google and most search engines use automated software agents called crawlers, also known as spiders or robots. Crawlers visit Web sites frequently, reading and capturing most of a page’s text as well as following links to other pages within the site.
The information about a site the crawler collects is added to the search engine’s index of Web pages. The index is like a library’s card catalog—except the catalog is constantly revised and includes a card not just for every book but for every chapter of every book and every article in every periodical in every library in the world.

When you perform a query, the search engine rapidly analyzes the information in its index to find matches. The results of your search are listed in order of relevance, with the most relevant pages listed first. (I’m talking, of course, about organic search results, not the paid results, that is, advertisements, you see at the very top and on the right side of Google search results pages.)

The search engine determines what’s most relevant to your query using many different factors. Google uses over 100 factors, including where on the page your search term appears and how often the term appears. For example, I just did a search on the word videoconferencing, and Google found millions of pages (as of this moment in time, 2,020,000, to be exact). Among the top search results at that time were a Wikipedia entry and a BusinessWeek article. In both cases, the word videoconferencing appeared in the Web page’s title (that’s where location comes in). And the word showed up at least four times within the first 250 words of the entry and article (that’s the frequency factor at work).

While most search engines follow this general model, no two search engines do things exactly the same. That explains why you can get different results using the same term on different search engines.

Google’s PageRank[ii] algorithm is one of the ways Google differs from other search engines. When Google’s cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin met, they were both graduate students in computer science at Stanford University. They had a class project to come up with a way to find valuable information within piles of data. This project led to the development of PageRank.

PageRank judges the likelihood that a particular Web page is “good” in the same way we tend to judge other people. For example, if you ran into a stranger on the street and, for some odd reason, he started to explain search to you, you probably wouldn’t take him seriously. Why should you? He’s a stranger. You have no way of knowing if what he says is legitimate.

However, you bought this book, and you’re reading this chapter. Quite possibly, you believe I have something useful to say about search. Why are you inclined to believe me, and not the stranger on the street? Mostly, it’s because the publisher wouldn’t have let me write this book if I didn’t know what I was talking about. (Right?) In other words, you believe me because someone you trust (the publisher) trusts me.
PageRank essentially works in the same manner. Instead of asking people it trusts, PageRank looks to see if Web pages link to the page it’s ranking. It “trusts” Web pages more that have more sites linked to them. In other words, if lots of sites link to a page, that page for some reason must be worthy of all those links. Thus, that page is probably “good.” And, as such, it receives a higher PageRank, which helps move it up in Google search results. By the way, you might assume that PageRank got its name because it ranks Web pages. But you’d be wrong. In a pun, Larry Page named it after himself.

Ranking search results accurately is difficult to do, primarily because there’s a lot of complexity in our language. For example, if I told you only that I went to the bank, would you know for certain that I went to a place to get money? Or would you think I’d been hanging out by the side of a river? Similarly, if you did a search for apples, how would the search engine know if you were looking for results related to a fruit or for a particular technology company? Google algorithms make an educated guess based on enormous amounts of data compiled from millions and millions of past searches. In this case, Google guesses that usually, if you type apples as a search word, you’re probably searching for information about the fruit. Google hedges its bets a bit; the top search results you’re likely to get will be for the fruit as well as for the technology company. However, if you enter apple, the odds increase markedly that you’re looking for the technology company. In this case, your top search results are overwhelmingly related to Apple the company. Thus, Google gives different rankings of results depending on whether the s is there or not....

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Random House
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 030771246X
• ISBN 13: 9780307712462
• Einband: Audio CD
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Alive AG; info@alive-ag.de; ; Von-H�nefeld-Str.2 DE 50829 K�ln; K�ln; Deutschland