How to Find Out Anything: From Extreme Google Searches to Scouring Government Documents

Book Preface

How much money does my boss make? Where is my great-grandmother buried? Who did my college girlfriend marry? How many other card stores are there in the town where I want to open mine? How can I change careers at the age of fifty? What companies would want to buy what my company produces and whom should we contact?

Welcome to the information age. Questions like these were once no more than things to ponder as you fell asleep, but now the answers are at the tips of your fingers—if you know where, and how, to look.

Research is the process of finding out for yourself what somebody else already knows. Every time you consult a book on how to cook a flounder filet or Google for information about your daughter’s college or ask the advice of your doctor about that strange pain in your arm, you make the assumption that an answer to your question is out there. You assume that someone has written a cookbook or built a website or studied physiology thoroughly enough to correctly diagnose what ails you. Your instincts are right, because we live in the Information Age.

In our literate society, people record what they know. They research and publish books. They create websites. They tweet on Twitter. They write articles, make videos, and appear on TV. They store knowledge in their own heads. Information surrounds us as surely as water surrounds a fish, simply because someone decided to record what he or she knows. As evidenced by everything from ancient cuneiform writing pressed into clay tablets to the latest breaking news story online, humans need to put what they know into a form more permanent than speech. Whether the record is private, like a diary, or public, like a newspaper, ideas, thoughts, and data are stored in written form.

Paradoxically, for all the uncountable words and pictures we can conjure up with the click of a mouse, the Information Age poses it own unique problem: With so much information available, finding the useful fact or reliable study or collection of data to answer a question turns out to be more challenging than it seems, even with a powerful tool like Google to help us look.

This book will address the single most common misconception of the Information Age: that Google is the be-all and end-all of research. Speaking as a law librarian with more than twenty-five years in the research trenches, I can tell you that it isn’t. Google has an important role to play in many research tasks, but it’s only one tool of many that professional researchers rely on to get accurate and timely answers to thorny questions. It’s ideal for many ordinary, humdrum tasks, like locating the address of a restaurant or finding out last night’s baseball scores. The picture is much different, though, when we start to distinguish quick searches from serious research. Getting past a dependence on Google and other search engines is the focus of this book. As all good librarians know, there’s a lot more useful information in the world than what search engines can deliver. And even on those occasions when Google is, in fact, the right tool to use, too many people overlook the powerful features of the “Advanced Search” option and instead muddle through with sloppy, bloated search results. There are better ways to find what you want.

Serious research is information gathering that is complex, demanding, and undertaken for a more critical purpose than finding out how tall your favorite celebrity is. For instance, you may be conducting research to flesh out a business proposal for a new company you want to set up in the solar power industry and need to find competitive intelligence. Or you might be a graduate student writing a paper on an emerging scientific subject like nanotechnology. Maybe you’re putting together a family genealogy project and digging through historic records. In these instances, your research will require you to talk to experts, find books, or perform more in-depth research. The world of knowledge is a big one, and as I’ll soon make clear, Google cannot see it all.

Complex research requires skill, imagination, and creativity. It’s no longer the exclusive province of librarians and journalists. Any researcher—from students to scientists, journalists, and job seekers—whose curiosity ranges beyond simple searches will see just how much richer and more informative the online and print universe can be. This is something every student and professional needs to understand.

Most important, though, is learning how to think through a research problem. All questions, from the idly curious (Did that guy in eighth grade who played guitar ever make it as a musician?) to the academic (I need to create a comprehensive bibliography on all articles and books written about Renaissance painter Andrea del Verrocchio for a biography), can be approached the same way. Knowing how to work through a research problem will allow you to reliably find whatever it is that you need to know, be it frivolous or profound.

As you’ll see, finding information is not a haphazard task; rather, it’s an explicit process that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Like any technique, it can be learned. Research techniques are dependable ways to bridge the gulf between knowing and not knowing. Whether you’re nosing around your local town library to find a biography of your favorite writer or downloading giant data sets from a U.S. government agency or from a university in a remote country, the principles of research are the same. By mastering the research process and undertaking it in the spirit of adventure and discovery, you’ll soon realize that it is indeed possible to find out anything.

The Process of Research

The first thing a researcher needs to learn is the art of crafting a question. This is where all good librarians begin their searches, and you should too. So let’s plunge right in and start where most research ordinarily begins—the question itself.

Ask a Question That Can Be Answered

Philosopher Bertrand Russell said it best: “The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution.” Asking a question that can be answered is the greatest challenge that most researchers face too. If there’s a single place where many otherwise bright and industrious people make a wrong turn when looking up information, it’s at the very beginning of the research process. If you don’t know what you are looking for, how will you know when you’ve found it?

But it’s not enough merely to ask a question. You need to ask the right kind of question. Questions come in two varieties: open-ended and factual. The difference between the two is remarkable.

Open-ended questions ask for opinions and offer no definitive answer. Such questions, although frequently very interesting, do not readily allow for a solution. How would you come up with a definitive answer to such open-ended questions as, Is legalizing marijuana a good idea? Is Rome a better city for a vacation than Buenos Aires? Should the federal government spend more on the army than on education? As you can see, these questions open the door to discussion, but as far as getting to a concrete answer, they are impossible to work with.

Factual questions, by contrast, are answerable. For example, What is the population of Chicago? What drugs most prolong the life of a victim of cystic fibrosis? How many first dates does the average woman have in a lifetime?

Certainly many worthwhile research projects can arise from an intriguing but impossible-to-answer question. The conclusions that open-ended questions call for are great, but those conclusions can be drawn only after a steady accumulation of facts. More to our purpose, we need to ask answerable questions for the eminently practical reason that if a question has no end, neither does the research. Pursuing an open-ended question can be a fool’s errand. So, to become a skilled researcher, step number one is learning how to craft the answerable question.

Say you’re a reporter for a business magazine and your editor wants to run an article on computer executive compensation. The editor asks you to find out if computer executives are overpaid. This is a great idea for a magazine article. It would probably make for a nifty feature in any number of business and tech magazines.

Your initial reaction might be to start Googling the question right away, and you type in “Are computer executives overpaid?” You would soon come up against some cold, hard truths. An open-ended question like that, which has no right or wrong answer, is not something that Google can wrestle with effectively. As we’ll see, it’s a simple finding aid, not the Oracle at Delphi. The question flunks the initial smell test for the simple reason that there is no factual answer to the question. What you or the editor might call overpaid would sound like peanuts to Bill Gates.

Not only does this question suffer from the crippling flaw of calling for an opinion, but it isn’t well-defined. Exactly which executives are we talking about? CEOs? Financial officers? Head programmers? And which computer companies are we talking about? Would this be companies that design software, like Microsoft, or companies that retail computers, like Dell? In short, this question might be a plum assignment for a skilled reporter, but as far as an answerable question goes, it’s worthless.

But don’t throw your hands up in frustration and disgust just yet. Instead, let’s recast that open-ended question into a series of factual questions that you can answer.

By coming up with a series of factual questions to ask, the initial abstract question starts to take shape as a concrete project. These factual questions will yield to diligent research because answers to each of them can be found. You now have a game plan. As I’ll show in later chapters, you can answer these factual questions by searching public records databases, scrutinizing library catalogs, talking to associations, and conducting in-depth Google searches. For now, it is enough to know that successful research begins by asking not only the right questions but the right types of questions.

So how do you turn those hazy, unanswerable, open-ended questions into something you can work with? To determine exactly what someone is looking for, professional librarians conduct a reference interview. A reference interview is the formal process by which an answerable question is extracted from a general description of what a person is looking for. For a conscientious librarian, it’s critical—failure to interview the patron properly can result in a waste of time and money. I know from personal experience. One afternoon, a lawyer called to ask me to send him a company’s annual report, which I dutifully did. A few minutes later, he asked me to send him the company’s proxy statement. Then, not long after, he asked for the company’s quarterly report. Finally, he called me, the exasperation and frustration evident in his voice.

“Do me a favor,” he said. “Find out who this company’s general counsel is.” Ah, so that’s what he really wanted! The lawyer was asking for what he thought he needed—the annual report, the proxy, and the quarterly report—rather than for what he actually needed, which was a discrete piece of information contained in precisely none of the documents he asked me to send to him. (I found the answer in a book titled The Directory of Corporate Counsel.) Because I failed to have a reference interview in the beginning, I wasted both of our time. A ten-second interview would have prevented it.

Because you probably don’t keep your own personal librarian on retainer, you need to learn to conduct a reference interview with yourself. The goal is to distill your initial curiosity into an action plan. Once you get the hang of it, you’ll be able to quickly cut through the fog of open-ended questions to create a list of queries with definitive answers. As long as the questions you ask yourself begin with the words what, when, where, or who—the classic four Ws of journalism school, with the occasional addition of how—then you are well on the way to constructing questions that, when answered, might also illuminate the larger, open-ended question. Understanding precisely what you need to know is the difference between successful research and a never-ending slog through the back alleys of the Internet or the dusty shelves of libraries.

Understand the Scope of Your Research

After you’ve created your information shopping list, you need to decide how much of it you need. A research question can be as simple and quick to answer as, What is the formal name of China? (It’s the People’s Republic of China, according to the CIA World Factbook.) Or maybe you need complex, book-length research that requires locating specialized repositories of information, contact with experts, and reviews of obscure documents and publications, which may take months to compile. (You’re writing a book on the invention of CT scanning for diagnostic imaging for use in the medical field.) Or maybe, as in many research projects, you’ll need to dig through disparate information sources before you have enough facts gathered to create a coherent picture:

Repeat the process until you’ve found everything you want.

Assume you’re about to do a sales pitch at a company to sell your new human resources (HR) software. You want to know something about the HR director before you meet her. Do you need to know every detail about her? Or is it sufficient to know only that she has worked at Amalgamated OmniCorp for ten years and that she holds an MBA from Wharton? If that’s the case, then your research may be over once you’ve looked up her bio from standard business biography sources. But what if you want to hire her to be the head of your HR software sales department so that she can sell your wares to other HR directors? In that case, you’ll want to know more about her—her former positions, perhaps her graduate school thesis, and presentations she has delivered at the annual conference for HR directors. Your research will broaden considerably, requiring many more queries in databases and generally taking longer than a simple bio request.

But what if, instead of wanting to hire her, you want to sue her because she bad-mouthed you and your company on a blog? In that case, you need to really turn over every rock in the public record, see quotes in the news, and make sure that any information that pertains to the lawsuit has been located. This biographical egg hunt now becomes a more extensive exercise in digging up details. Formulating factual questions is one step; knowing just how much information you need is another critical aspect of successful research.

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