Thursday, January 13, 2005 - 11:34 AM JST
Name:
trek/taro
Google is incredibly powerful, if you know some of the tricks to using it. You can see the search I used by clicking on the "Google Search" link I provided. The trick is to reduce what you want into several key words. You want to find information about changing from a tourist visa to a working visa in Japan. The key words in that thought are:
Japan visa tourist work change
The order is not important really, but you have to get rid of the words you don't need, and make sure to include the words that cover the key points of what you want to know.
That search by itself produces quite a list of sites, many of which are just people spouting off about what they *think* is possible, or how they think the Japanese government should change the rules, etc. So you need a way to make the search return more authoritative results. All Japanese government agencies with web sites use addresses that end with ".go.jp". Pretty clear that it means "government japan". Google has a collection of useful features, one of them is the "site" limiter. If you search like this:
Japan visa tourist work change site:go.jp
Google will return *only* hits from Japanese government web sites. Cool huh? You can use it to limit searches to only one site too. If you wanted to search fuckedgaijin.com for the same information you would do this:
Japan visa tourist work change site:fuckedgaijin.com
If you wanted to exclude all Japanese government sites you could do this:
Japan visa tourist work change -site:go.jp
The minus sign flips the site command into an exclusion mode.
With a bit of time you will get better at choosing keywords to search with. Once you manage that you will be able to find just about anything you want.