Google

Tom’s favorite search tool is Yahoo. Our director of education likes Google. My favorite search tool is Tom! Every day we field questions from CLNC^® consultants and even attorneys that are easily found through a quick Internet search. Tom has become a master at searching out the most arcane facts from the furthest reaches of the Internet. He uses a variety of search engines, constantly juggles and refines search terms, and even uses whole sentence searches. If you want to know what species of monkey is endemic to Canada, he’s the one to ask.

If I need a restaurant in Oslo or Poughkeepsie, he’ll not only find me a local review and suggestions on which species of sea urchin tastes best in October, but ferret out the name of the fisherman who sold it to the restaurant. Al Gore may have invented the Internet, but Tom is the one who has harnessed its power for the good of Vickie-kind. I may be exaggerating a little here, okay I’m exaggerating a lot. But with a little bit of mental sweat you can search as well as Tom.

There’s a wealth of medical, nursing, state and federal resources out there. You can learn about who can report Medicare and Medicaid fraud, what’s new in healthcare regulations and find answers to all sorts of questions simply by putting Google to work for you. Before you take the time to fill out that mentoring request to learn the definition of a legal term in your home state of Idaho just do a quick online search. We constantly answer mentoring questions that could have been answered with a simple trip to Google. Get the most out of your CLNC^® Mentoring by doing your search before you request mentoring. What’s good about this is that you will expand your knowledge and at the same time learn you can answer many of your own questions.

I always tell new CLNC^® consultants that, “we won’t do your work for you” and we won’t. We’re here to be your coach and to guide you on how to do the work, handle your CLNC^® business and to answer your questions (things you can’t necessarily find online). Don’t use the mentoring process to replace the thinking process or the nursing process. You’ve been trained to think critically as a nurse, you do it on the job and you do it naturally. Apply the nursing process to the legal nurse consulting process and you’ll come out a winner.

There’s a world of knowledge out there. Use it and use it wisely. Educate yourself and your attorney-clients. But, like Tom says, “Search smarter, not harder and don’t depend on Wikipedia unless you want to be road kill on the information superhighway.” Twitter you later!

Success Is Inside!

P.S. Comment on one interesting search you’ve done recently keeping in mind this blog is rated G.

Okay – this week it’s search engine tips. Google is by far the most popular search engine today. Many legal nurse consultants even use it as a verb (“No Billy I won’t help you spell tuberous. You’ll just have to Google it.”). So, if you’re going to use Google to the illogical exclusion of all other methods of searching, here’s how:

• Limit your searches to use exact phrase searches. Encase your search phrase in quotation marks “certified legal nurse consultant” to only get results that have that exact phrase somewhere in the document. If you leave off the quotation marks, your results will have the words from your phrase throughout the document, in order or not.
• Limit your sources to limit your results. Any general search will turn up pages and pages of results from just about every top level domain (TLD) such as .com, .us, .edu, .etc. You’ll have to sort through a lot of not-so-useful results to get to what you want. Limit your searches to just domains with the type of TLD site you want to search, such as “student loan sources site:gov.” This will give you information from only .gov sites. This works if you know where you want to look for what you’re looking for.
• Limit your searches to specific file types. Lots of government documents are stored on the Web as PDFs. If your initial searches give you the confidence to search for a PDF (or any other form of document) type “filetype:PDF” after your search and your results will be limited to results in that document format.
• Be wordy. Believe it or not I’ll actually type a whole sentence into the search box (with and then without quotation marks). Just about every question you can ask has been asked and answered by someone and this will sometimes take you straight to the answer you need.
• Keep tabs on yourself. I use the Firefox browser as an alternative to Internet Explorer 7, and when I do a search, I like to right-click a link and open it in a new tab. This allows me to do a better job of remembering which links I’ve opened without all the back-clicking and reduces the possibility that I’ll lose my search results page and have to start over.
• Don’t look in all the same places. Use more than one search site for your searches. (You can Google a list of search sites or search engines.) I’m guilty of this myself. I tend to rely on one search site. But different sites return different results depending upon how they index their information. Your best bet when searching is to keep open multiple tabs in your Firefox or IE7+ browsers and use a different search engine in each for the same information. You’ll be surprised by the varied results.

Keep on techin’,

Tom