One of the best things on the Internet, that everyone already knows about, is Google. Google makes it so you easily find information that is already available on the Internet. This is perfect for development. Here is an example.
A couple weeks ago, I was asked about how we could add a chat room to a website and if it would be difficult. I knew that the chat rooms you see on sites were mostly in Flash, which I knew minimal about, but after 5 minutes of research, I replied “Yes”. Why?
Chat rooms have been around forever. From my development experience, I know that for stuff on the Internet that has been around for a while, there is a 95% chance a developer put a free solution of it out there somewhere. The reason why would be a good lesson for an intro to microeconomics class.
Initially someone made the first ever chat room. This was initially expensive for the consumer since there was no competition. Then competition joins because there are plenty of developers out there who can figure out what that first person made. This drives the price down. On the web, the price keeps getting driven down until it is free (a lot of the time). This is because a developer realizes he can make the tool for free and then make money off of other areas like monetizing the traffic they would get from giving away a useful thing for free.
So that answers why I can most likely answer yes, but it does not answer why I that was my answer. The answer for that is Google. Smart Google searching can answer whether something has been already developed for free rather quickly.
But what should I search for? The first search you probably think to do is the wrong one. “Free Chat Rooms” popped into my head. This just gave me a list of a bunch of free chat rooms to sign up for and use (not what I wanted). The best thing about Google is if your initial search fails, just dust yourself off and try again.
- Here are two easy tips for smart Google searching.
- It should be something detailed but concise. For this example, I knew what language I wanted to develop in which was PHP. This was a good starting point on a good search. So I tried “Free PHP Chat Code”. Sure enough the first thing that pops up is something called “PHP Free Chat”, exactly what I wanted.
- Just type the complete question. I do this a lot. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. I typed in for this search “How to add a chat room to my website”. Sure enough there are some results that should start leading me down the right direction from this search as well.
My method is usually to see if I can come up with a detailed enough search that gives me exactly what I am looking for and if that fails, then trying the type in the full question method. I do this because as you can see from the above example, doing the first method tends to give you exactly what you are looking for while the other tends to start leading you in the right direction.
Either way, Google is awesome for this. I still think they are creepily similar to “Big Brother” from 1984 with how much information they have on me as a person. That’s a different discussion though.
