Finding stuff online for boomers #23thingsmci

Have you come across the “OK, Boomer!” memes? Well, that’s a hype you should not miss. I suppose it is a generational slur from the very, very young to the baby boomers as well as the not-quite-so-old! As a member of generation X, I fall into the latter category.

The under 25s feel that old fogeys, starting with my generation, just do not get them anymore. We are not digital natives and therefore must look to them as the last hunter-gatherers among the up-and-coming farmers; or like Neanderthals among homo sapiens.

Well, I am a Neanderthal who thought he was quite savvy with making tools. In today’s parlance, I am quite confident that I know my way around electronic devices and the worldwide web.

However, we are living through a digital revolution and things are moving fast. High time, I thought, to put my digital skills to test and join the mci’s 23Things course. And, no, TikTokers, I do not mean mild cognitive impairment.

The course provided tips for smarter Google searches, which I put to the test.

 

First things first: I am using DuckDuckGo and the tips worked on this platform as well.

Secondly,  I am currently investigating standards of documentation. I therefore started an online search on this topic.

I started very broad using the following search terms: standards of documentation social. No Boolean operators, quotation marks, stars…nothing.

The results were already quite promising. Lots of hits and sufficient pdfs to get a feel for the field.

Next, I tried a slightly more sophisticated approach and added one Boolean and quotations marks at the appropriate places: “standards of documentation” and social.

 

The quotation marks definitely helped in making the search more specific, which was reflected in the content of the hits returned. And yet, in many cases the results turned out to be almost too specific. This may be because the phrase “standards of documentation” seems to be an HR favourite and returned quite a few job offers.

My subsequent attempt used the “intitle:” prefix, which I had not been aware of prior to this course. Wow, now we were talking! The results were fantastic. Just about every single link returned was helpful.

However, my search interests were more or less limited to the field of psychosocial care. Therefore, I added “and social” to my search string, resulting in: intitle:standards of documentation AND social.

 

BINGO! Every returned result (at least as far down the list as I checked) was relevant.

I could also have used the prefix “author:”, set a filter like “country code” or file format, or used the * as a wildcard. However, I did not need those additional parameters. The “intitle” was the most effective search strategy.

Well, children, it appears that this boomer is still able to learn! As a matter of fact, that many humans still carry Neanderthal genes, which have helped us to supercharge our genetic defenses.

Us boomers might still come in handy.

Just saying.