From what I've seen interacting with other engineers, it seems that most of us, when we need to research something relevant to Cisco networking, go straight to Google. This is typically the most expedient path toward an answer, but it isn't necessarily the most reliable or the most accurate. The problem is that Google or another search engine will direct you to whatever resource on cisco.com it considers most relevant; one must be careful to consider the hardware platform and/or IOS version specific to the situation at hand.

For example, an engineer who googles for documentation concerning the configuration of a particular IOS feature will often find what he needs, but may not be aware that the documentation he is looking at is for a newer or older version of software, or that it applies to a family of hardware different from the device he is configuring. This might not be a problem all the time, but it is a good way to get bitten by minor differences in supported features and configuration syntax.

A more reliable approach is to navigate Cisco's documentation manually to find the exact information you need. People often complain that Cisco's online documentation is too difficult to navigate, but after digging through it numerous times to find references for the many blog articles I've written, I think it merely takes a bit of strategy. That's why I decided to write this article.