Where do tech pros go for tech support? Here are their top four fix-it strategies

First stop, of course, is your preferred search engine: Google or Bing (DuckDuckGo uses results from Bing). Search is as much art as it is science, and the folks I talked to cautioned that it usually take several tries with different keywords to get proper results.

If the problem involves an error code or detailed message, use that exact text as part of your search terms. Use the “site:” filter to restrict search results to a particular domain. This search, for example, returns useful results for a blue-screen error on Windows 11 with code 0xC2: Bad_pool_caller.

site:support.microsoft.com “windows 11” error 0xC2

For hardware problems, include a model number or product ID if one is available. If you want to exclude results that include a specific word, put a minus sign in front of it. To filter the results so they don’t include any links from a specific domain, put a minus sign in front of the site: operator, so that it’s -site: [URL of the site you want to avoid searching]. 

Even if you consider yourself a search pro, there are probably a few tricks you can learn to make searches more useful. Here are some pages worth studying and bookmarking.