| Chapter 3: Precision Business Searching
Google, http://www.google.com UPDATES AND ADDITIONS: NOVEMBER 2004New Search Engines MSN Search, http://search.msn.com/ Since publication of the book, the significant addition to the general search engine arena has been Microsoft's entry to the field, which as of November 2004 is still in Beta. Early reports and reviews (including my own take) is that despite all the early anticipation, Microsoft has not really introduced a real competitor to Google. I've also recently come across a few specialized search engines that I feel are worth highlighting: CyberJournalist SuperSearch, http://www.cyberjournalist.net/supersearch/ CyberJournalist's SuperSearch provides visitors with the option to search a wide range of Web-based search engines from a single page. Includes are general search engines, major news sites, specialty news sites, reference sources, company directories, legal searches, government sites, expert databases, people searching, and more. Find.com, http://www. find.com Find.com is a pure business oriented search engine, created through a partnership between FIND/SVP and TripleHop Technologies. Find.com allows users to search the general Web, as well as zero in on a more focused collection of substantive business oriented documents and sites. Note that some of these resources, such as market research reports, are termed "premium" and are fee-based. Blog/RSS Search Engines You should also be aware of some new search engines that specialize specifically in searching blogs and RSS Feeds. Here are the names of a few that I recommend: BlogPulse, http://www.blogpulse.com By the way, a useful source if you're just getting started with RSS is "Top 100 RSS Feeds," which will identify the most popular RSS Feeds: Top 100 RSS Feeds, http://feeds.scripting.com/rankings More Google Search Tips Below are a few more tips that I think that you'll find useful to keep in mind when running a search on Google. These are reprinted from the November 2004 issue of The Information Advisor : 1. Use Google to dig up more of the "opaque" Web. Google has expanded what it indexes in its database via its "Print" program, by indexing the full text of traditional print materials: these are articles from selected publications as well as excerpts from print books. When you do a search on Google, the search engine indicates that a page is part of its Print program by including a small "print" icon with the retrieved result. The URL of these pages also will contain the following character string: print.google.com/print Because the print articles represent substantive information not easily found on the Web, you may wish to restrict some of your Google searches just to those sources as a way to better qualify and filter your search results. Unfortunately, Google does not provide a specific feature or limit function to allow this. However, you can do it by employing Google's "site" search feature. For example, if you were doing a search for information on "PDA shipments" and wanted to search only Google's print collection, you could input the following search statement: site:print.google.com "pda shipments" 2. Searching on vague terms. What do you do when the only words you can think of to describe your topic are broad, vague, ambiguous, or amorphous? As good searchers know, using imprecise words in an Internet search engine can result in lots of irrelevant results, resulting in wasted time trying to read through and hunt down pages that actually do discuss your research topic. One solution? Try to think of two or more unambiguous, precise terms that, while not descriptive of the subject of your research, would very likely be mentioned in any good discussion of the topic, and use those words to run your search. For example, we recently needed to do research on a rather broad and somewhat ambiguous topic: where on the Web can one search for past published articles from print magazines. Entering words like articles, published, past, print, magazines into a search engine were not likely to retrieve useful on-target results. But we did know the names of two specific services that offered this capability (offering print archives on the Web), so we decided to run a search just on those two company names. Our assumption was that any Web page that included both of these services' names was likely to have a good overview of the topic. We wanted to enter both names because simply entering a single company name would retrieve announcements, press releases, and other information from that company alone. If you use this strategy, you can make your word filters even more useful and powerful by choosing a company (or product or term, etc.) that is a relatively new and prominent. This way, that term will then serve not only as a filter to retrieve relevant pages, but also will retrieve just those pages that have been updated recently or where the author has kept up with the field well enough to have mentioned that newer entity in his or her page, article, review, blog discussion, etc. 3. Search for your topic in the best context. Often, you'll do a search on Google and retrieve relevant results, but will have questions or concerns about the credibility of the particular author, particularly if the article includes analysis. Or you may want to read about your topic from a person who has a very particular perspective (e.g., someone in your industry, an information professional, a European point of view). But is there any way to run a search on Google and retrieve only pages from knowledgeable people who are analyzing the topic from the perspective most relevant to you? One strategy is to once again leverage Google's "site search" feature. Run a search on your topic, but limit your results just to pages from those sites, blogs, journals, and other sources that have the perspective you are looking for, and who you feel are trusted sources. For instance, say you wondered what knowledgeable information professionals' perspectives were on Yahoo's news alert service. Simply entering "Yahoo News Alerts" in Google will retrieve hundreds of discussions, news and analysis pages, and each with a different, and usually unknown perspective. But what does a trusted source from a peer say? One of our own top trusted sources for a knowledgeable information professional's perspective (and we think should be one of yours too!) is author and speaker Gary Price, founder of ResourceShelf (http://www.resourceshelf.com). If we go to Google and enter: Site: http://www.resourceshelf.com "yahoo news alerts" we then retrieve only the pages on Gary's site in which he discussed "Yahoo news alerts". Alternatives to Google A fast growing area in the search engine arena is called "Personal Search." These are search engines that, unlike standard search engines that retrieve the same set of results for the same search for any user, are designed to personalize the search, and retrieve those items determined to be of most likely interest to that searcher. This is done either by asking the user to submit a personal profile of interests, or by initially monitoring what pages and sites the user chooses to review. Here is one of the first of these new types of Personal Search sites, which is a personalized news search engine: Findory Personal News, http://www.findory.com/news/ |