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Do you use Google every day? Mastering Google’s powerful search refinement operators and lesser known features could, over a years time, save you days scouring over irrelevant results. Even more enticing is the promise of elusive nuggets of market research and competitive intelligence out there waiting to be discovered.
Learn how you too can become a Google expert searcher and extract invaluable data about your competitors and about the market like never before - with laser-like accuracy and extreme efficiency.
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Seek and ye shall find. But not always.
According to an IDC (International Data Corporation) report from last year, knowledge workers spend 15-30% of their day searching for information. What’s worse, more than half of their online searches fail.
That doesn’t bode well for us, does it? Hopefully, this series has gone a long way to help you make the invisibly rich Internet more visible. We close this series by tapping into the wisdom and experience of two renowned Google experts—Nancy Blachman and Tara Calishain—who share some of their favorite tips, tools, insights, and search strategies for researching with Google.
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There’s a brand new meta search engine on the block called Jux2. Its premise is to find the overlap between the top 10 results across two major search engines. So far I’m really impressed with it. It even has a toolbar for Mozilla FireFox.
Jux2 conducted some tests to determine just how much overlap there is in the top search results on Google versus Yahoo! The results of their tests are very interesting. Such as:
- Analysis of Google and Yahoo! search results on the 500 most popular search terms found that, on average, Google and Yahoo! shared only 3.8 of their top 10 results. Furthermore, 30% of the search terms had 2 or fewer overlapping terms, and only 17% had 6 or more overlapping results among the top 10.
- The overlapping set of top 10 results between Google and Ask Jeeves was even smaller: 3.4 out of 10. And between Yahoo! and Ask Jeeves, smaller yet: 3.1 out of 10.
- Analysis of 91 random searches on Google and Yahoo! found that the two engines share only 23% of their top 100 results. Furthermore, only 4.8 of Google’s top 10 results even made Yahoo’s top 100. And only 5.4 of Yahoo’s top 10 made Google’s top 100.
For me, Jux2’s findings were a good reminder that the algorithms of the major search engines are markedly different, more so than one might imagine. So a metasearch engine that compares and contrasts two partially overlapping sets of search results makes a lot of sense. I think I’ll try Jux2 for a while and report back on my experiences.
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This series is all about surprises and revelations—at least when it comes to using Google. And here’s another: some of Google’s most valuable properties aren’t even search engines. Rather, they are resources or tools such as online research assistants, Web-based email, browser toolbars and social networks. These resources can be extremely valuable to marketers and should be considered one of the sharper tools in your research arsenal.
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Now that you are intimate with the range of Google operators to refine your research searches, it’s time to put the knowledge into practice in the real world. It’s also a good time to delve a little deeper into the essential features of the Google interface.
Here, in part three, we’ll apply the secrets of Google in a search for information about the food industry. Then, I’ll share the 20 essential features of the Google user interface—the virtual place where you spend most of your time interacting with Google—and apply those to our search example as well.
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If you’re like most of us, you use Google almost daily as a search tool. But Google is capable of so much more than simple search. You’d be surprised at what Google can do to make your work life more productive and easier on any number of levels. In the first installment of this article series, you learned several ways to refine your Google searches. Here, in Part 2, I will take you through 20 time-saving search operators. If you incorporate these shortcuts into a Google search session, you’ll both save time and minimize frustration.
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If you’re like me, you use Google every day to find things—news, technical support, events, tips, research documents and more.
Were you to master Google’s powerful search refinement operators and lesser-known features, over a year’s time you could save days scouring over irrelevant results. Perhaps even more enticing is the promise of elusive nuggets of market research and competitive intelligence out there waiting to be discovered. This five-part series will show you how to find what you need quickly and with laser-like accuracy
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Many ecommerce sites have session IDs or user IDs in the URL of their pages. This tends to cause either the pages to not get indexed by search engines like Google, or to cause the pages to get included many times over and over, clogging up the index with duplicates (this phenonemon is called a “spider trap”). Furthermore, having all these duplicates in the index causes the site’s importance score, known as PageRank, to be spread out across all these duplicates (this phenonemon is called “PageRank dilution”).
Ironically, Googlebot regularly gets caught in a spider trap while spidering one of its own sites - the Google Store (where they sell branded caps, shirts, umbrellas, etc.). The URLs of the store are not very search engine friendly: they and are overly complex, and include session IDs. This has resulted in 3,440 duplicate copies of the Accessories page and 3,420 copies of the Office page, for example.
If you have a dynamic, database-driven website and you want to avoid your own site becoming a spider trap, you’ll need to keep your URLs simple. Try to avoid having any ?, &, or = characters in the URLs. And try to keep the number of “parameters” to a minimum. With URLs and search engine friendliness, less is more.
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“We are grateful to Stephan for planting the seed for one of the most successful Web projects The Carter Center has undertaken to-date.”
“… redesign of our database’s structure and ongoing co-operation with our website administrator has resulted in a continual increase in traffic, search engine rankings and registrations of volunteers and projects.”
