Do you speak Google?

[Richard Waller]

I came across this article in someones Newsletter. It was new to me. Herewith for your information.
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You probably know someone in your team or family who can instantly find out almost anything on the web leaving the rest of us with 18 million links which don’t quite answer the question. How do they do it?

It turns out that up to 80% of pages in a search engine exist only in that search engine. That means that using several search engines will yield different results. Also many useful sources of information will not be found in any search engine – think about EGi and iSurv, which are databases held behind a subscription log-in. This is known as the invisible web and is estimated to be 500 times the size of the searchable web.

Back in the last century, we said that one day all information will be free, or at least freely available, on the web. This is not the case and companies are finding that they can charge a lot for content. Do you subscribe online to the FT, or pay to receive premium research from McKinsey Quarterly, or (the daddies of them all when it comes to charging) Gartner or Forrester?

If you are serious about searching the web yourself, there are several ways to ease your research:

1. Use a search engine which searches through several other engines - Copernic, for example (www.copernic.com) or dogpile (www.dogpile.com)
2. Create a Wiki for your business – a wiki is a website which builds up as people add content to it, all the time creating new pages and links themselves – it is easier to use than it sounds and cheap. Although we have to admit that getting people to use it regularly takes some hard work. Look at Google Sites (www.Jotspot.com)
3. If you have a larger company, build a portal which acts as your intranet and links to key resources both internally and externally.

Getting to the right information faster than anyone else gives you an advantage in this climate. Take 10 minutes away from Google and save some time.