Tutorial – Guide to Effective Searching of the Internet
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This part provides a compendium of tips for specialty search topics. Most of the individual topics below simply offer bulleted suggestions for ways to first approach these searches. Once used, you will likely find for yourself additional 'power searching' tips.
Topic 42: Product Searches
Topic 43: Competitor Intelligence
Topic 44: Market Research
Topic 45: Finding People
Topic 46: Finding Places
Topic 47: Finding Documents
Topic 48: Finding Recent News
You may click on any of the links above to go directly to that topic.
Here are some tips on finding product information:
- Use product-oriented specialty search engines (see [15, 16])
- Make sure and use the actual product name in your search; use if possible a search engine that supports mixed upper and lower case
- Join appropriately stemmed search terms using the product and known company name. For example, to find information about Deep Query Manager™ (DQM) from BrightPlanet.com, do not enter specific version information or full company titles; these can overly restrict your results. Instead, try "deep query manager" AND brightplanet
- Try limiting your searches with the .com filter; this will eliminate references from non-business sites (also note that some countries, such as Australia, United Kingdom and Canada, also use the .com site domain for commercial sites before the country domain)
- For product-related announcements, use the domain or url search options [see Topic 33].
Here are some tips on finding information about competitors:
- Job listing or employment sites can be a first indicator of whether competitors are growing or not. Try searching at the individual company's site and job listing engines and monitor trends over time
- Alternatively, but less useful, is to search resume posting services to see if many employees are bailing out. Because employees in this position are generally reluctant to announce their intentions, this tactic is generally less useful than company hiring trends. One important exception: When the company itself has internally announced a staff reduction. Sudden blips in resume postings can be a valuable early indicator
- Many of the major search engines contain sections entitled 'Company Profiles' or a similar category. Try restricting searches to these categories
- One useful way to discover partners of competitors is to use the link search option, providing the source company's name in the link text [see Topic 33]
- Generally, all company sites have a press releases section, where new advances or partnerships are often announced. Using the domain option [see Topic 33]. Conjoin your specific text query with a stemmed press* in the domain. Since often press releases are kept by news services for longer periods than on individual company sites, you may also want to make sure your query includes the company name as well
- Archive your useful queries and repeat over time. Search engines that contain a 'CGI-bin' name in the query produced can be saved and used again later
- Monitor business news sources [see Topic 46].
Here are some tips on doing market research:
- For comparative market information, first try combining words or phrases that you know appear for the leading market-share companies or products. For example, in cereals, try conjoining "Rice Krispies" and "Captain Crunch"; for computer software, try conjoining 'IBM" with "Microsoft". These should not be the ending of your query, but the narrowing beginning
- Consider using search engines that support the link, host or domain filters [see Topic 33].
Here are some tips on finding people on the Internet:
- Use specialty engines
- Use search services that support people searches (Yahoo!, Snap, LookSmart)
- Use search services that support mixed upper and lower case
- Be careful, first names are often not reliable; many individuals use initials or diminutive forms for first names ("Mike" v. "Michael" v. "M."), or may be cited by others in different ways.
Here are some tips for finding information about geographical locations on the Internet:
- Try limiting your searches by country domains
- Use regional Yahoos
- Used mixed case when searching for proper place names
- Consider using the geographic-specialty search engines
- Try using the location options in HotBot's SuperSearch mode.
Here are some tips for finding documents:
- There is a tremendous storehouse of information not actually catalogued by search engines because the documents are not distributed as Web pages. When looking for such information, consider using meaningful document title names plus common extensions for such files (e.g., .PDF for Adobe Acrobat, .DOC for MS Word documents, etc.) in your queries
- Use the Anchor option in AltaVista, (such as anchor:"pdf" for Acrobat files) matched with an appropriate query dealing with your topic of interest
- Use engines like Snap or HotBot that support specifying file types in your searches.
Normal search engines and services are generally poor sources for recent news. Some of them, however, (Excite and HotBot as two examples) have separate search options for news postings that tend to work in the same ways and with the same features as the standard engines.
There are very useful magazine and daily periodical resources on the Web, notably including Time Warner's Pathfinder, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, San Jose Mercury News, etc., etc. Most of the major magazines and dailies now have a Web presence.
Another useful source for news are the 20,000 newsgroups on the Web. While news per se is not covered in a traditional way, opinions and links to breaking news sources can often be found. DejaNews and AltaVista's Usenet are good starting points.
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