Effective research both online and among peers

For a seasoned SRE, there is nothing more horrifying than turning to Google during an outage. When I see a team of engineers gathered around a search engine, that means standard troubleshooting methods have been exhausted, or the issue is related to one obscure error. In these cases, if the issues aren’t resolved in minutes through googling, the resolution time is often hours.

The art of the Google search

For those who haven’t spent some time learning the different techniques you can use in a Google search, such as quote marks or the plus symbol, you are truly missing out. We’ll cover a few basics here:

• Minus sign (-) means leave out – for example, if you were looking for the maximum speed of a Mustang horse, not the car, you could use mustang horse speed -car
• Plus (+) means must include – for example, to search for an error code specific to an IBM software, you could use error 110 ...