OK, let’s continue the search for the mysterious John Smith. The previous hint initially found 228 million entries for the simple search for John Smith. That’s a few more than anyone would be prepared to search through page by page. The we pared that down using “John Smith” and further by using “John Smith ~genealogy.

So here’s the problem with “John Smith”. If John is out there on the internet with either a middle initial or a full middle name, this simple search for “John Smith” with question marks isn’t going to work to find them.

What do we do? The * and ? and other search tools are called “operators”. The * ~ and ? are all operators as well as + and -.

If John MIGHT have a middle name, here’s what you do: “John * Smith” ~genealogy. That search will return 208,000 responses, more that the 111,000…