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 Issue 4 • October/November 2005
Getting Beyond Google: Strategies for Serious Online Research
Google may be the most widely used online search engine in the world today, and for good reason. Simply type in a few key words and presto! You find what you’re looking for. But when you want to conduct an in-depth scan of a field before launching a new initiative, dig up research on a new program, or explore new approaches to program evaluation, you want to be sure you have all the best online research tools at your fingertips.
Why should you consider going beyond Google? Consider its limitations:
Google, like all search engines, only allows you to search part of the web
The size of the indexable World Wide Web is estimated at about 11.5 billion pages. Of these, Google covers about three-quarters, while Yahoo, Ask, and MSN lag a few percentage points behind.
Results from search engines overlap, but only partially
Remarkably, there is limited overlap in the results provided by the top five online search engines. Examine the first page of results for the most popular search engines, and you’ll see some dramatic differences.
Search engines aren’t as effective as you might think for finding high-quality Web content
When you need quality information, it’s wiser to search for it directly using specialized search engines or “web directories”. Many web directories go beyond Google by allowing you to search news, audio, video, blogs, subject directories, and specialized databases.
A great deal of Web-based information can’t be retrieved through search engines at all
The so-called “invisible web” comprises huge amounts of quality information that is completely unavailable through search engines. Many specialized online databases and Web directories refuse access to search engines, but they’ll give you access if you search or browse them directly.
Ready to brave the world beyond Google? Take these 9 steps:
1. Make a plan. Planning is the forgotten step in online research. Before using Google, take a few moments to list out concepts and key words related to your search topic. These two search engines can help you refine your search: http://www.google.com/help/refinesearch.html
http://beta.exalead.com/search
2. Build a regular search habit. Instead of wasting precious research time visually browsing search results, first search for key words using the “Find (On This Page)” feature in the Edit drop-down menu bar on Internet Explorer. Or use the similar search feature for documents created in Adobe Acrobat, Word, or Excel.
3. Dare to be more complex. Google may be simple, but with 11.5 billion pages on the Web, research is more rewarding when you use complex search queries and multiple search engines. The point is to zoom into your topic quickly, so first use multiple key words to build search queries. Then, you can use the powerful query syntax available through most search engines to dig further.
4. Harness the power of phrase searching. You can save yourself hours of research time by placing search phrases in quotations. Type in “affordable housing” with quotation marks, and your results will only include pages with that exact phrase. Without the quotation marks, you’ll get every page that includes either of these words – together or not.
5. Know your limits, and name them. Sometimes, you may want to limit a search to specific file types or locations. Google, Yahoo, and MSN allow you to limit search results to Adobe Acrobat Files (.pdf) – a common format for online publishing of research reports. Add “filetype:pdf” after your Google search query (e.g., “foundation performance” filetype:pdf), and you’ll only get Acrobat documents containing your search term. Or, you can limit your searches to Word documents “filetype:doc” or Powerpoint Presentations “filetype:ppt”. If you suspect a specific site is likely to contain what you’re looking for, tell Google to go there. For example, to learn about “leadership development” from the Putnam Community Investment Consulting web site, enter: leadership development” site:www.putnamcic.com to jump directly to results from that site.
6. Use visual tools. When conducting field scans and literature reviews online, the visual search engine from Touchgraph could open up a whole new world for you. Touchgraph uses Google’s similarity index to let you identify web sites that are similar to one other. It’s a great way to get a quick view of organizations that share the same field.
7. Bring dead sites back to life. Amazingly, there is an Internet Archive for web sites that existed up to eight years ago, but are no longer “live” at www.archive.org. For the serious online researcher, this site is akin to finding buried treasure. On it, you’ll find snapshots of web pages at different points in time dating back as far as eight years. Next time you search for a site only to be told “404 Web Page Not Found”, just retype the web address into the “Wayback Machine” at www.archive.org to see what that web page looked like two months ago, or two years ago. The Wayback Machine is especially helpful when you’re conducting historical research for documents on sites that no longer exist.
8. Evaluate your findings: are they credible? Use your common sense and research instinct to evaluate what you find on the Web. Is the source credible? Can you find contact information? Can you verify the information elsewhere? Go to www.alexa.com and type in the domain name of any web site, and you can find the name of the site’s host along with their phone number, geographic location, and even some comments from other site visitors. Or, you can conduct a link search on Google (e.g. link:www.yourwebsite.org) to see who links to a particular web site and what they might know about it.
9. Store your treasures carefully, then dig them up again quickly. When most of us search the web, we gather snippets of information that we store in some folder that we may not be able to find later when we really need it. At www.netsnippets.com you’ll find NetSnippets, a research management tool that you can download for free and use to capture and organize your Web research. Or, go to www.esnips.com to find a slightly less powerful version of NetSnippets that lets you and others access your research files over the Web from any computer. Features of the Esnips tool include text capture, image capture, document capture, and sophisticated screen capture. You can also annotate documents with key words and short descriptions, then create organized reports to share with others. A powerful complement to NetSnippets is Google Desktop Search at http://desktop.google.com/. This tool not only lets you quickly find any Web research saved to your computer desktop, it also lets you search your Internet Explorer history files to retrieve Web pages you visited in the past that may be relevant to your current project.
Many thanks to this month’s guest author, ArnoldChandler, who graciously allowed us to adapt his original article for this IdeaMail. Arnold is the Principal Consultant of Chandler Strategy Consulting and can be reached at arnold@chandlerstrategy.com or 510-364-6989. Chandler Strategy Consulting provides trainings in online research and conducts freelance research projects.
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