How
many times a day do you run a search only to find that the top sites
don’t yield the results you’re looking for? Sometimes this can
be based solely on the type of search you’re running (i.e. there is
a lot of information and it’s a broad field), sometimes it can be
caused by those pesky SEO’s out there doing their job and other
times it’s simply a matter of knowing how and where to search for
what you’re looking to find.
Let’s
begin by discussing the origin of this article. I was looking
through our site statistics and noticed an anomaly. The phrase “seo
for yahoo” was showing up. Now, this is-and-of-itself is not so
odd – there are many people out there looking for ways to rank on
Yahoo! however what I did find odd was that all of those clicks were
coming from Google. To me this didn’t make sense so one night on
the phone I decided to ask my father about it. “If you were
looking for a way to rank on Yahoo! how would you search?” I got
the same answer as my stats showed, on Google. To me it seems
obvious that if you want to rank highly on Yahoo! and you’re
looking for methods to do so, that you would naturally go to Yahoo!
and look for sites that are ranking highly there. If they can rank
themselves on Yahoo! then logically they know how to rank sites
highly on Yahoo!
This
got me thinking about the way that I search vs. the way many people
do and in watching others it became clear that a good percentage of
the time people spend weeding through the results could be eliminated
if they knew how and where to search, something I have spent more
hours learning than I would care to reveal.
In
this article we will cover the following areas:
Long tail phrases
The quotation marks
The cache
Different services
Different engines
Long Tail Phrases
The
term “long tail” refers to phrases that are non-generic or
extended. What I mean by this is that we have added keywords to the
search query to specify what type of information we are looking for.
Let’s take for example a person who is trying to decide what kind
of car to buy. They’ve looked at some Hondas and just want to know
more about them. Here are the different types of searches:
Generic
– honda (you will end up with a top 10 filled with Honda sites, but
what if you want to know about its ratings, reviews and consumer
experience)
Long tail if interested in reviews –
honda consumer reviews, honda driver rating, honda award, etc.
Long
tail if interested in experiences of others – honda consumer
review, honda “my experience”, honda blog, etc.
I
think you get the idea.
What
you need to ask yourself is really what kind of information are you
looking for. Any of the long tail phrases will give you results
outside of the Honda websites where you will get consumer opinions on
the car, awards they may have won, etc.
Long
tail phrases are the godsend of the searching world. If you run a
search and can’t find what you want, think about what other words
would likely appear on the page and add those to the search box.
You’ll greatly increase your chances of finding the appropriate
information appear higher in the search results. Which brings us to
quotation marks.
Quotation Marks
I
highly doubt as though there’s any more useful function of
searching that is less used than the quotation mark. Quotation marks
tell the engine that the words inside must appear on the page in
exactly that order. You’ll notice above and in one of my examples
I used the query – honda “my experience”. This would tell the
engine that I want the word Honda to appear on the page as well as
the exact phrase “my experience”. If we think about it, the
results should contain feedback from people who have an experience
with the brand. While there are a couple sites that appear in the
top 10 we may not be interested in the majority provide just this
type of information.
The Cache
The cache pages of the search engine results don’t so much reduce the number of pages you’re going to have to look at to find what you want, they simply speed up the process of checking them. Try running a search for something and rather than clicking the actual link to the site, click on the cache of it. What you will find is that all the phrases you have entered into the query are colored so that you can find them easily on the page. This will allow you to quickly scan a page for specific words rather than having to read through everything. In the example above the word Honda would be one color and “my experience” would be shown in a different color. This will allow you to quickly scroll through the page for the words “my experience” to make sure that they are indeed referring to their experience with a Honda as opposed to some other experience they had.
Different Services
All
of the major engines offer different search services. Here are just
a few of my favorites:
Blogs:
When
searching for blogs I like Google
Blog Search.
There are many great blog search services out there including
Technorati
and more but I’ve found Google’s Blog Search to be the easiest to
access since chances are, I’m already on Google. Blogs are a great
resource when looking for opinions and information you may not find
through traditional media.
News:
All
three major engines have great news search engines. I’m not going
to recommend one over the other here as when you’re looking for
news, it’s great to check them all as the current nature of the
news results in each engine providing different results based on
their spidering frequency. You can visit Google News here,
Yahoo! News here
and MSN news here.
Research
Information:
When
you’re doing research for a big paper or just want some scholarly
information to settle an argument then Google Scholar is a great
stop. This is a site I visit when I’m looking up information to
help my boys with school or after sitting puzzled while reading
Steven Hawking wondering exactly what the heck he’s referring to in
some space-time reference or another. This in one to add to your
favorites if you’re a student, a researcher or you just find
yourself with odd questions that only a scholar could answer. You’ll
find Google Scholar here.
Images:
When
you’re looking for images or maybe a new desktop for your PC then
there are two places to go that will save you time. My favorite is
Flickr
where most images are viewed and commented on however Google
Images
(that’s right – Google again) can often provide better results
for some queries. To use the example above, if I were looking for a
new desktop for my computer I would likely use Google Images. The
advantage of using the image search is that it allows you to see –
well - an image in the results. You can then go to the page it
originates from and see what else is there but it can cut the time it
takes to find a site that has the type of images you’re looking for
significantly. Flickr is better for images you won’t find
elsewhere on the web. For example, if I wanted to view some photos
others had taken at the Search Engine Strategies Conference in San
Jose I would use Flickr. They have a tag system as well so people
with a common theme can tag their images similarly to make them easy
to find. For example, at SES San Jose a tag was sessanjose2006.
Enter that tag and most of the photos taken there (that people wanted
to publish at least) will appear in the results.
Videos:
There
are many great services for searching for video content online.
You’ve most likely heard of YouTube.
If you hadn’t heard of it before Google agreed to purchase the
property, you’ve likely heard of it since the price tag of $1.65
billion was announced and widely discussed in the news. The service
will be added to Google
Video
at some point in the future. But again, to lock yourself into Google
and Google properties severely limits what you’ll find and how
you’ll find it. If videos are what you’re looking for then
you’ll also want to visit Spiked
Humor,
which operates similar to YouTube (visitor submissions) and a new
service that’s been launched by Lycos called Lycos
Cinema.
Lycos Cinema provides a new take in video publishing on the web
wherein they are displaying ads at the beginning and the end of the
video (which reminds me of what they’re now doing in real cinemas
except that Lycos doesn’t charge $20 including popcorn to watch
it). The videos you’ll find there are submitted by publishers so
you’re not likely to find the newest releases but you will find a
great collection, scheduled viewing times and you get the opportunity
to chat live with other viewers while the movie is playing.
Different Engines
You
may not believe me when I say it but there is more than one engine.
I know I know, shocking but true. Whether you use Google, Yahoo!,
MSN, Ask or one of the other lesser known engines, most people tend
to stick to their first choice without taking too much time to
consider that there might just be other engines that can run the
query better.
Make
no mistake, I use Google and when I say I use Google I mean I use it
to search dozens if not hundreds of times per day. As an SEO this is
simply a fact of life but when I’m searching for personal interest
my use of engines varies from the searching patterns adopted at work.
While
I do generally tend to stick to the major engines I find that each
one serves a different function. They loosely break down as follows:
Google
– Good for finding general information and, if used in conjunction
with the tips above, some specific information if you know precisely
what you’re looking for and what words are likely to appear on that
page.
Yahoo!
& Ask
– If I’m not sure exactly what I’m looking for but I know what
type of information I want then these are the two engines of choice.
Both deal well with queries put in the form of a question and provide
highly relevant results. Ask also provides some interesting features
including Binoculars that appear beside the domain name which, when
hovered over, show a snapshot of the site allowing you to decide if
you want to go there or not before clicking on the result and waiting
for it to load.
MSN
– As I mentioned above, there are times when you’ll find the
results skewed by pesky SEO’s. With a lower market share than
either Google or Yahoo!, MSN is often overlooked by SEO’s who focus
on where the majority of the traffic lives. With extremely active
crawlers MSN has a great pool of web pages to reference and is far
less “gamed” by SEO’s. Their algorithm isn’t as advanced as
those of the other two major engines but at the same time there
aren’t as many SEO’s building sites that focus on high rankings
for MSN so they don’t need it to be.
Alternative
Engines – When I’m thinking of alternative engines I’m
generally thinking of niche or regional engines that focus on
specific information. If, for example, I was looking for information
on sites in or information on my native British Columbia, Canada I
would visit Listings
BC.
The majority of these are not so much search engines as searchable
directories which means that the pool of sites is likely much smaller
however the odds of relevancy are much higher.
Conclusion
I sincerely hope that you find this information useful and your searching experience made better with these tips. There are certainly more ways to increase your searching abilities than I’ve been able to list here but to cover absolutely every scenario would be virtually impossible in anything short of a 300 page book. What I have tried to cover above are the features I use the most and which apply to the majority of searchers. You of course are unique and you may have other requirements or may have developed your own tactics for dealing with irrelevant or less relevant results. Either way, hopefully you feel your time reading this article has been worthwhile and you can now venture forth with increased searching abilities and reduced frustration.