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Latest Most searches fail at the question, long before they ever fail at the tool.
The Opening Move

Finding Things Out Is A Skill, Not A Reflex

Everybody searches all day and almost nobody was ever taught how. The gap between a person who finds the answer in four minutes and a person who gives up after forty has very little to do with the tools they used.

Watch two people look for the same thing and you will see the difference straight away. One types a few words, glances at what comes back, types roughly the same words again with a bit more frustration in them, and concludes that the answer is not out there. The other stops, sits back, and asks a question first: what am I actually trying to establish, and who would have written it down? That second person is not smarter. They are doing a different activity. Searching, done properly, is a craft with moves and habits, and like any craft it can be learned by an ordinary person in an ordinary afternoon.

The reason nobody teaches it is that it looks like it needs no teaching. A box appears, you type into the box, results arrive. The interface is so accommodating that it hides the fact that you are making half a dozen decisions with every attempt: which words, at what level of specificity, aimed at which kind of document, held to which standard of proof. Get those decisions wrong and no amount of clever typing will rescue you. Get them right and the search is often trivially short, which is precisely why skilled finders make it look like luck.

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Asking The Right Question

Searching For A Word Versus Searching For The Thing

A search box matches text, but what you want is almost never a piece of text.

Guess What The Page You Want Would Actually Say

The strongest move in searching is to imagine the document before you go looking for it.

Narrowing And Widening

Why An Expert's Search Uses Words A Beginner Would Not Know

Expertise in searching is mostly a stock of words that only exist inside one field.

When The Results Are Too Specific, Go The Other Way

Narrowing is a habit, and like all habits it keeps going after it has stopped helping.

Where The Answer Actually Lives

The Best Material Is Not On The Open Web At All

Vast, carefully organised collections exist that a general search will never show you.

A Reference Desk Beats Any Tool You Own

There are people whose entire profession is finding things, and they will help you for nothing.

Judging What You Find

When Many Pages Agree, Check Whether They Are One Page

Repetition feels like corroboration and is usually just circulation.

Dates, Undated Pages, And Knowing When To Stop

Two habits that turn a pile of findings into something you can rely on.

About Findz

Findz is about one skill: finding things out. Not marketing, not visibility, not how a business gets listed or discovered, which is a different subject entirely and belongs somewhere else. This is about the person on the other side of the search box, the one with a real question and forty minutes, trying to establish something true. We think that skill is badly taught, mostly because it is assumed to need no teaching, and that the gap between a competent searcher and an incompetent one is enormous, entirely learnable, and almost never about the tools involved. Everything here is written for a general reader with no training and no special access.

Two things you will not find here. We do not name tools, engines, collections, registers, platforms or companies, and we do not give the specific tricks of any of them. Named things change, they differ from country to country, and a reader who learns one has learned something perishable. We write about categories instead, because the categories persist. We also do not cover looking into people. Researching a private individual is a separate activity with its own obligations and its own capacity to cause harm, and it is not what this publication is about. Nor do we discuss getting at material that is paywalled, restricted or not publicly available, and nothing here is legal advice.

What is left is the large, useful, mostly ignored world of the open record: the official lists, the published decisions, the deposited papers, the catalogued collections, the guidance written by the body that actually makes the rules. It is bigger than most people imagine and much of it was created at public expense specifically so that ordinary people could consult it. Our editorial position is simple. Ask a better question, learn the vocabulary before you demand precision, go where the material actually lives rather than where it is convenient, follow every claim back towards where it started, and stop when you have enough. That is the whole craft, and anybody can learn it.