ItsGeekToMe.co

Q:  I know you have answered this question before, but I have difficulty finding the answer in your column’s history because of my weak skills. Can you please give the number of the column which explains the procedure?

– William K.
Fort Walton Beach, Florida

A: I had a little difficulty decoding your self-referential question, William.  I finally decided you were asking about how to search my website, and asking for a link to a column in which I explained the procedure.  Well, with over 800 issues under my belt, it’s tough, no, make that impossible for me to remember all the topics that I’ve written about, much less the issue numbers in which a given topic was discussed.  Unique topics are easy, since searching for them returns a very limited number of search results.  But when the topic itself is searching – phew!  I’ve talked about searching in dozens and dozens of issues.  Topics include searching the Internet using Google and Bing, “less is more” searching using Google, searching Facebook, Windows, iPhones, various Setup facilities, e-mail, and so on.  In fact, after searching my own archives, I’m going to change the estimate above from “dozens and dozens” to literally “hundreds” since I seem to talk about searching in one form or another every second or third issue.  My point is that it’s next to useless trying to search for an issue that contains such a commonly used word.  It’s easier to just discuss the matter from scratch, so that’s what I’m going to do.

As I always do when writing It’s Geek To Me, I’m going to rewind this topic all the way to the beginning, to include complete information so that no matter where you, as a reader, are entering this process, you’ll hopefully have a complete understanding of what I’m talking about.

So, early in the column’s life, I established a web page that’s mostly an archive of every issue ever written.  That’s 824 of them so far, including this one.  You can access the site at ItsGeekToMe.co (NOT .com!)  No, I’ve never managed to lay my hands on the .com version of the address, because after I had paid a small fee to acquire it, some greedy URL broker snatched it out from under me and put it up for sale for thousands of dollars.  Apparently, there’s market value in the name that I chose for the column, but since literally everything I do related to I.G.T.M. is free, there’s no budget for me to pay someone for the rights to the URL that should be mine. So, “.co” it is.  Of course, the column’s site is free to read and search, and it even allows you to comment on individual issues, and maybe even have discussions with your fellow reader-Geeks.  This is a far better option than writing replies in e-mail that only get read by me.  But I digress.

In the column’s 16-year history, I’ve covered probably close to a thousand topics, since I often answer multiple questions per issue.  That’s a lot of material to wade through if you’re looking for help on something specific.  So, there is a search capability built-into the site.  William, your question on how to use it was a little surprising to me, since to me, it seems perfectly obvious.  Then again, lots of things seem perfectly obvious to me, but as Spouse Peripheral is always reminding me, I often don’t think the way most other people think.

So, from just about any page on the site at ItsGeekToMe.co, you’ll find the words “Search the site” in the left-hand navigation bar.  Under that is a text entry field.  All you need to do is enter the term for which you’d like to search into the field, then either press [Enter] or click the little magnifying glass icon.  The site will look through every issue in its archive, and return only those in which it found what you’re looking for.

As long as we’re talking about searching, here’s a Google tip for you: you can narrow your Google search to a single web site by adding “site:<URL Name>” to your query.  For example, to search my site for columns on, let’s say Epson printers, you might enter “site:ItsGeekToMe.co Epson” into Google.  This ability is wholly separate from a site’s built-in search capabilities, so it might return fewer results.  Try it out for yourself.