For many popular search terms, search engines suck, and suck badly. For example, I just did a search on Google for a pinyin translation of money. Now, I’m Old Skool, and think pinyin is for p^Hwussies. Real Men use Yale system…
…but never mind that.
The point is that I know the word for money in hanyu, and in Yale romanization it’s spelled “chian.”
Searching on Google for “pinyin money translation” returned page after page of crap. Utterly worthless websites full of garbage links taking me nowhere I want to go.
Now, this is partly because WordPress has facilitated an explosion of worthless web sites parked on otherwise useful domains. All because it’s so easy to pull the trigger. Someone with even a small amount of unix hackery can automate the entire process of purchasing domain names, installing a WordPress-based spam blog and populating each 1 in 5 of the blog sites on the interwebs with a profusion of utterly worthless linkbait. But don’t blame WordPress, it’s just the tool after all.
Ok, maybe that was a bit strained, but it IS tiring to scroll through page after page of worthless websites.
So…
What does Worthless WordPress Websites have to do with the title of this article?
I’m glad you asked.
In short, very little, and that’s the point: I want high-quality search results, not a pages and pages of spam blogs. I need more tools in my toolbox (as do you), a way to “pre-filter” my searches so that I know I’ll get results that are probably useful instead of hopefully useful.
Here’s one way I grab high quality information that I can find later.
I subscribe to a fair number (ok, like hundreds) of email newsletters from advertisers, marketers and all sorts of other types of industries. I don’t read very many of them. In fact, I probably read 1 or 2 per day at max, and then probably just scan those. The rest: File WithOut Reading. Yes! I FWOR them.
Here’s the deal: Most of these emails and newsletters have pretty d*mn good information! But it’s just Too. Much. Information.
Instead of reading this tsunami of emails, I use them to build a personal electronic library of useful information. Thus, the search results from my gmail archive are generally pretty good.
A brief digression…
Yes I know that—especially the marketing newsletters—have time-limited offers: You Must Act Now!
That’s fine too. Once in a while I’ll even buy something. The real value for me is seeing how these offers are structured and how the sales copy is written. (In technical terms, these are part of my personal swipe file.)
Do you file without reading? How else are you building a personal digital library?
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