(posted 6/15/98) By Rivka Tadjer You can accomplish a lot using Web search-engine sites, perhaps the best source today for free business research -- as long as you know how to use them.
Search engine sites can help you, as a business, accomplish a few rather impressive tasks: finding out about competitors, finding new customers, finding suppliers/contractors/products to use, finding new advertising outlets or Web communities for co-marketing deals, and finding employees. (See sidebar for rundown of some major search engine sites and how to best use them.)
To start understanding how to best conduct research online, it helps to think about the search engine sites themselves in three separate categories: General Search, Business Listings, Specialty Searches. General Business Yahoo! is one of the best search engines for this because it has the best descriptions of sites when the list pops up--so you can get a quick idea before you click on all the individual site URLs. Yahoo! also has a well-developed job-hunting link--for people in search of employment and employers looking for employees. The Excite search engine is also good because you can find out about suppliers, products, and potential advertising communities very quickly. You will notice that preferences for search engines can be personal. Craig Williams, CEO of Optical Image Network Group, a computer consultancy with 10 employees and $1 million in annual revenues in Springfield, Ill., says if he's looking for fun, entertainment, or cool stuff for his kids he'll search on Yahoo! Otherwise, he prefers Lycos for his main use of the Web: looking for suppliers, contractors, and products he can use in his business, plus keeping up on developments in marketing consulting business. "When I search on Lycos, I feel like I'm getting serious, straight results about serious businesses out there," says Mr. Williams, who has been using the Internet since before the Web and is familiar with all search engines. "With the other search engines such as Alta Vista, Excite, and Yahoo!, I get the feeling that they sell the top spots of search results and so the results aren't accurate." When you search on a subject, say "office supplies," you will get a list of links in order of relevance to your query. Mr. Williams says he often sees that the top results aren't as relevant as ones lower down on the list (you can test this because most search engines give a relevance percentage by the result--90% relevant, 67% relevant, etc.). "I can see why search engines might sell these top spots in an advertising model, but it's a pain because then I have to cull through additional results to get what I want," he says. For the record, no officials from these search engines Mr. Williams mentions admit to selling top spots on lists. The most important thing to remember about some of the major search engines in the General Search category--Alta Vista, Excite, HotBot, Infoseek, Lycos, and Yahoo!--is that they do specialize in slightly different things. Yahoo! will give you the URL of the competitor or supplier you just searched on right away, whereas Alta vista might give you information or articles written about the companies before you find the URL. You can always get to search engine sites for free, and most services they offer are free. Business Listings Now, the general searches on these sites are all free. And the results will be only as good as their databases. Each of these sites has one million-plus names, addresses, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses. What can cost is when you up the ante of your search. WhoWhere charges 45 cents, for instance, to allow you to search against all the regional Bell directories. You need to surf to its Connect Now service for that wwcn.whowhere.com. You enter in the name, city, and state and it hooks automatically to the right Bell directory. In most long distance cases the charge is worth it. Aside from the paid service, is there much difference among the listing search sites? Users tend to say no, that they go back to the same one if it worked the first time. Specialty Searches "I like NewsWorks [www.newsworks.com] to find out about a potential client or news in business because it searches 130 newspapers for relevant articles and then brings it back to you with links," says Mr. Williams. Another popular news clipping search site is Deja News. Then there's the old-timer Internet fallback: Web Crawler. What Web Crawler does is get every instance on the Web of every keyword you enter without any discrimination to context or logic. This is a last resort site--if you can't find what you're looking for anywhere else on the Web, go to Web Crawler. But be prepared to get tons and tons of results for any query. Once you understand where the search engines are and what they do, it is important to become efficient at the search language called Boolean to make the most of the search power. You can search without knowing what Boolean is, but for the most honed results it is worth grasping it--and it is simple. Boolean, put simply, is a method of using conjunctions, prepositions, and punctuation symbols to focus a search. If you are looking for clients in the real estate industry, but you don't want residential realtors, search under "real estate" NOT residential. It's easy and saves you a lot of time culling through the results later. How To Search Most EffectivelySearching is all about mastering Boolean logic. Here are key tips. Most search engines use some form of Boolean logic--which means using "AND," "OR," "NOT" and a few other words and symbols that construct better-focused searches. For instance, if you ask for "office supplies" but are getting too many office supply stores in the New York region, you could re-search using "office supplies" NOT "New York" to get fewer results. Put quotes around phrases, a company name, or person's full name. "Jane Doe" or "office supplies" will yield more precise results--without quotes you may end up with URLs of offices, and then supplies of all kinds, or 1,000 Janes plus 2,000 sites on female deer. Change word order if you don't get what you want. If you search for "office supplies" you will get different results than if you search for "supplies office." Go at a search from as many angles as possible. So, if office supplies doesn't give you useful enough information, try specific supplies--desks, computers, phone systems, or add the words "small business" AND "office supplies." Rivka Tadjer is New York-based journalist and columnist who writes regularly for Wall Street Journal Interactive, Fox News Internet, and Small Business Computing & Communications. She specializes in how technology affects the behavior of consumers, businesses, and government. ARTICLES DIRECTORY |