Search engines, especially Google, have become so ingrained into our society now that even the term “google” has become a verb: “just google it”! Whether you are using Google, MSN, Yahoo or even Ask.com or any of the many other available search engines, there is no doubt that about 70% of your online time is spent somehow in their grasp. But did you know that as a marketer, you can let search engines work in your favor and turn research into a piece of cake?
Many of us just use a very small fraction of what the many search engines offer us in terms of tools and services. In fact, many are unaware of some of the really neat little nuggets that are buried just a little bit below the surface. Invest a little bit of time researching how to use some of these nuggets and you will be really surprised at just how much search engines have to offer besides just “search”.
One little nugget that you may find particularly interesting is the ability to have Google show you results as if you were physically in a different location. Search engines obviously optimize their search results based on your physical location, as determined by your IP address. But what if you live overseas but do online work in the US? You need to see those AdWords ads and sponsored links as they would appear in the US, but they don’t appear to you because you are living abroad. Well, Google has a parameter that allows you to control this behavior. Simply do your search as you normally would and then append “&gl=us” to the end of the search string in the URL within your browser and refresh the page. Do some research on it and you’ll find that you can even specify the US Zip code to target and see ads from all sorts of other countries.
There are many buried treasures within the search engines, you just have to dig around a little bit. For example, did you know that you can use Google to search for a keyword only against a specific site? It’s really easy, just do this: “site:amazon.com the e myth” By prefixing your search with the “site:domainname.com” syntax, you are telling Google that you only want it to look on that one site for the results.
You can instruct Google to limit your results by currency. For example only showing results that have been posted within the past year (hint – just add this to your url “&qdr=y”) or perhaps you want Google to only search against the “Title”, you can do that too.
The point is that search engines provide much more utility than most people know and some of these tools are a dream come true for many marketers. Goolge has maps, images, video and so on, most of us know all about that. But there are many other features that it offers, most of them free, if you do a bit of research. Tools such as calendars and online document storage can be pretty useful if you know how to take advantage of them. Keep digging even further and you will discover things like Google Scholar, which is an excellent research tool in and of itself. Let your curiosity take its course and open your eyes to all that of the ways that the various search engines can save you time and money: are you ready to start exploring?
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