Suppose you’re an experienced engineer, but you genuinely don’t know the subject you’re researching, you encounter Hadoop, you want to answer a fairly basic question: "What is this thing, concretely?"

What do you actually do? Not what would you recommend that I do in general. I’d be much more interested if you actually did the experiment yourself and described what happened. That is to say : What was your first query, exactly? What did you open? What part did you read? What made you keep reading that source rather than going somewhere else? When you encountered a term you didn’t understand, which ones did you look up and which ones did you decide you could leave unresolved? What did you consider noise? Why? Did you reformulate the query? Search indirectly? Look for a discussion instead of documentation? Search a particular site? And where did you stop? Why?

If you can, it would also be interesting to give the short, concrete definition you ended up with after doing the search.

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One thing I’d ask you to be careful about during the experiment: try to notice which words or concepts feel completely obvious to you but probably wouldn’t be obvious to someone new to the field. I’m interested in that too, because otherwise it’s hard to separate search skill from knowledge you already had.

And if you already know Hadoop well, that can still be useful. Just try to separate what you already knew, what you only had to look up because you remembered roughly where to find it, and what you actually had to figure out through the search.

The idea is basically a small experiment: do the search, tell me your background, and describe as precisely as you can what you actually did (questions above).

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"REAL-WORLD" EXAMPLES

And if you have a concrete example you remember where you had to be ridiculously good at web search to find something, please tell me about it too. I framed the Hadoop example narrowly mainly so the discussion wouldn’t go in every direction, but Hadoop isn’t a hard requirement. Another example is completely fine as long as you’re precise about what you actually did - roughly along the lines of the questions above.

Thanks!