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In today’s world any competitive edge that someone can get is valuable. Those who have all the answers or know how to get them quickly are much more valuable employees and are more apt to succeed. This article deals specifically with Practical Searches. The Problem Searching article is available here
As a professional, I have gained so much by using Google efficiently. I never feel like I am out of my element or that anything is out of reach, because I know how to search correctly and intelligently. I am comfortable with the fact that I can find the answers or solutions to any problems that come my way. This in turn, makes me a more valuable asset to my employer.
The goal of this article is to teach you how to make use of Google’s power to make intelligent and targeted searches. You will learn how to:
· Use the appropriate Google tool for your initial search
· Create solid queries and search terms to maximize the number of quality results
· Cross Reference your search results in different Google tools to gain more results
Types of Search
Where to start searching depends on what you are looking for. There are two general categories of searches that you can carry out:
1. Practical Searches
2. Problem Searches
Practical Searches
These searches will often start with the following words:
· How to…
· Why does…
· Who is…
· What is…
· When does…
This article deals specifically with Practical Searches. Problem Searches will be covered in the next article in this series
Many people also instinctively search for specific terms. For example, someone wanting information about home businesses will search for “Home Businesses”.
In order to get the most out of a search in Google, it must be very specific. Someone typing Home Businesses will be flooded with every single site that mentions the words home and/or business in any order. Google is smart however, and will bring up the most relevant results first, but it can still be a very confusing mess.
But if you are looking for home businesses, odds are you are looking for something more specific. For example, perhaps you are looking for home businesses in the cosmetics field, from a reputable company, and that you can run from a website.
Many novice Google searchers will attempt the following search to get to the results that interest them: good cosmetics home businesses online . This search will yield the following results:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=good+cosmetics+home+businesses+online&btnG=Google+Search
You will notice that none of the results return any results specific to what you are looking for. Google attempted to return sites that mention every word in your query regardless of relevance. You see, Google is a great site, but if it were a person, would actually be quite dumb. While the search sentence good cosmetics home businesses online makes sense to you and me, Google, has no idea what you are talking about. What we need to do is make the search more specific and format it in a way that Google understands.
First, we must split up our search into a main search and a sub search. Our main search should be for home businesses dealing in cosmetics. Once we have our results for that, we can drilldown and find the opportunities that meet our other criteria such as reputable online businesses.
Secondly, we have to make the difference between words and terms. In our case, the words home and business are actually two words that you will most likely find grouped together on many sites. To group them together as a term, we simply need to group them together as using quotes: “Home Business”. For the record, Google does not care about uppercase and lower case letters.
We then need to remove the word good from our search because it is too broad, and between you and me, good is very subjective word. I might find something good, where you might find it not so good. The purpose of using the word good was to find reputable companies. We will use other search techniques later in order to determine how reputable a company is.
The next specific term we are searching for is cosmetics. Once again, we need to be careful here. Let’s not forget that Google is not a person, therefore, searching for things as we would say them will very rarely work. In this case, the word cosmetics is plural. If we try removing the letter S at the end, we are broadening our search to any word that contains cosmetic rather than cosmetics. We will also apply the same rule to home businesses by removing the ES at the end of businesses to only leave business.
Here is what our new query looks like: “home business” cosmetic
Which returns the following results:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%E2%80%9Chome+business%E2%80%9D+cosmetic&btnG=Search
As you can see we now have more relevant results. Right off the bat, we can start looking at these sites to find more information.
As mentioned before, we are looking for companies that will help you get started with an online home business dealing in cosmetics that is reputable. Visiting the first few sites in the results will help you determine if the opportunities listed meet your sub search criteria.
For example, in order to get more information about a specific site, you can always search Google for the web address you are interested in. In this case, we will Google www.careersinbeauty.com:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=www.careersinbeauty.com&btnG=Search
This will bring up a list of sites that reference the site you are interested, which can also bring up testimonials and reviews, or others using this particular service. Alternatively, you can be even more precise and use the following search query to find all sites that link to www.careersinbeauty.com: link: www.careersinbeauty.com
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=link%3A+www.careersinbeauty.com&btnG=Search
We originally wanted to find out if a company we are interested in is reputable. A good way of doing this is to search for the address of the site we are interested in with a trigger word next to it, such as scam or review. Using this method, we will find out if there are any sites out there that believe that our research subject is a scam or if there are any negative reviews for it.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=www.careersinbeauty.com+scam&btnG=Search
Alternatively if you were looking for a more personal type of review for a specific site you might want to use words that people might have used when describing the site or service. For example, if I wanted to find real reviews by real people about careersinbeauty.com I might append the word “sucks” or “terrible” after the search subject.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=www.careersinbeauty.com+sucks&btnG=Search
It is sometimes necessary to carry out more than one search in order to get the results we want. In our case, we ran at least two separate searches to find home businesses dealing cosmetics which seemed reputable. Using these cross-referencing methods, you should be able to narrow down search results and find what you are looking for.
Using the example above, we can use additional search operators to change the behavior of our original search.
“home business” ~cosmetic: By placing a tilde (~) in front of a specific term you are telling Google to find results for that specific word and its synonyms.
“home-business” cosmetic: Placing a hyphen in between two words tells Google to return results of the term which include a hyphen or no hyphen.
“home business” cosmetic -surgery: By placing a minus in front of a term, we are telling Google to exclude any search results that include that word. In this case we do no want sites that talk about surgery because we may get a lot of cosmetic surgery results.
Conclusion Searching effectively really gives you an edge in business. We live in a day and age where information has never been so accessible, so it is vital that you understand how to search effectively and drill down your searches to maximize your relevent results.
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Online Business 
