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thing, you usually find some type of response. However, there are times you can’t find exactly what you want. Or you think you have found exactly what you want, and you click on the link and it says, ‘Page no longer appears.’ This is when you want to kick your notebook across the room,” Richter said. “There is a lot of confusion out there, and thousands of business people have had these same experiences.” He explained that it’s important to understand how search engines really work in order to successfully mine them for important information. “Google, for example, is really nothing more than a big vacuum cleaner. Imagine a big vacuum cleaner going all over the Internet looking for Web pages. When it finds a Web page with words in it, it sucks up those words, goes back to Google headquarters, and throws those words into a big database,” Richter said. “Then, when somebody goes to Google and types in one or more of those words, all Google is doing is listing the Web sites that have those words in them.” The problem is, if a person types in a common word, such as “brush,” the user can be overwhelmed by the number ofWeb site offerings which appear. Richter said it’s essential to provide good information to a search engine in order to receive good information in return. Some “tips of the trade” that Richter provided to get the most out of a search engine, such as Google, are as follows:
■ THE USE OF THE MINUS SIGN (-) OR (NOT) — “Using the minus sign (or not) actually allows a person to remove search results that are not wanted,” Richter said. For example, if a school girl is assigned to write a report on the Vikings who lived in Norway 500 years ago, and types in the word “Vikings” on a search engine, that child will receive hundreds of sites about the Minnesota Vikings of the NFL. “This child doesn’t want to know about football, so she could type in lots of words such as ‘Vikings from Norway with swords,’” Richter said. “But if she simply types in ‘Vikings football’ she can greatly remove many sites that reference the football team. This is a tip a lot of people don’t use.”
■ USING “QUOTATION MARKS” — Richter said when searching for a phrase, use quote marks to treat the phrase as a single entity. Always use proper nouns. “Quotation marks are important when doing business searching. They actually tell the search engine that the words within the quotation marks must be in that exact order every single time,” he said. “Any time you are searching for a proper noun such as the name of a company, name of a person or even a phrase, this can greatly cut down on the number of results that are not wanted.”
■ THE USE OF A SEARCH ENGINE’S “ADVANCED” LINK/BUTTON — “Most of us look at a search engine’s ‘Advanced’ link and we think, ‘Oh, that can’t possibly be for me. That must be for a librarian or scientist,’” Richter said. “When Google built its search engine, it didn’t think like the rest of us. If we were building Google, we would call the ‘Advance’ link something like ‘Easy Search’ or ‘Simple Search’ or ‘Searching for Business Executives.’”
May 2010
He noted that using an advance search allows the person to greatly limit the Web pages that come up. It helps provide a more focused and limited search on specific topics.
■ USING GOOGLE’S “CACHED LINK” TO FIND WHAT A WEB PAGE USED TO LOOK LIKE — One problem people have when using a search engine is that sometimes pages can no longer be found. There are ways, however, to “find” that page after all. “Any time you get ‘Page Can No Longer Be Found’ what you need to look for is a little link called ‘cached.’ Again, if we were putting together a search engine, we would not call this ‘cached,’ we would call it ‘Polaroid Picture,’” Richter said. “Think of it this way, on top of the Google vacuum cleaner going all over the Internet is a Polaroid camera. Anytime it finds a Web site, it not only sucks up those words, it also takes a picture of that Web site and stores the picture back at Google headquarters. “If you do the right search in Google, information you are looking for will still appear even though the Web page is no longer there. The good news is, Google took a picture of what that Web site used to look like.” He added the “cached” link will highlight the words the user wanted to look up. Therefore, the person does not have to read a bunch of copy he/she is not interested in.
■ USING AN ASTERISK WHEN YOU CAN’T REMEMBER (FOR EXAMPLE: “VICE PRESIDENT OF *”) — “This helps when you can’t remember a person’s name, job title, etc.,” Richter said. “Knowing how to do this kind of search can be a huge time saver when looking for information that is missing. “If something you are looking for has not shown up in the first 10 listings you see on a page, then put in different words. I very rarely go to the second page of a Google listing.”
■ FINDING AN E-MAIL ADDRESS USING “*@XXX.COM” — Richter said when searching for an e-mail address, replace “xxx” with the Web site address of a specific company and surround the query with quotation marks. “Once you know what a company’s Web site address is, you can usually find the e-mail address you are looking for,” according to Richter.
■ CLICK “SHOW OPTIONS” ON THE GOOGLE RESULTS PAGE TO SORT RESULTS — By doing this, the user can find the latest in up-to-date news and visit the timeline feature for historical information on a company. Richter said by using the “Show Options” feature, a person can better relate to a client’s business in a positive sense. “The Internet has completely changed the way the traditional sales person does his/her job. In the old days, you had Continued On Page 25