Tip: Searching Google for solutions to a Microsoft product problem

Maybe this isn’t earth shattering, and most all of you already know this trick. However, I just stumbled upon it and am willing to bet at least a few people are troubled by searching google for answers to problems and finding the needle in the haystack. Here’s the scenario:\

You’re looking for Microsoft Knowledge Base articles on a error your getting with a particular Microsoft application and using google to do the search because you can search better with it compared to the Microsoft site. However, you get so much noise back in your results in links to pages that were never solved, the solution is ambiguous, or (frankly) the solutions that are given are coming from sources where you simply question which end of the gene pool they are standing in at the time they wrote the proposed answer… you know what I’m talking about. Those guys that give answers like Format and call me back later or “Re-install the OS to get the drivers updated”.

Well, I suddenly noticed a trend at the bottom of some KB articles I had to call MS to get an answer to a problem. They are tagging the articles with key words! Yes, I know it’s not earth shattering. However, the following might help you.

For troubleshooting articles, it seems they always tag it with: kbtshoot

For articles that mention a event log error message they always tag it with: kberrmsg

Soooo…. If you need to search google for a Microsoft product KB article put this in as part of your search! It greatly limits the number of noisy results in your search! For example, you get trouble shooting KB articles for Microsoft CRM try this in a Google search:

kbtshoot “Microsoft CRM”

Of course that’s very generic… but hopefully you get the idea. Enjoy!