Search Tips Report: Information You Can Use

A monthly newsletter from Eipert Information Services

March 2004 Number 3

Search Tips Report was a free email newsletter from Eipert Information Services, featuring practical tips about business and sci/tech information sources and research strategy for you to apply in your own business. See the archive of past issues.

Search Strategy Tip: searching within a company's website

Information on the website of a competitor or other company can be useful for various business functions: comparing marketing strategy, doing competitive intelligence, finding supply sources, etc. After locating a particular company's website, searching more deeply within that site may help pull out the information needed.

Of course, searches for information about a company should not be restricted to just that company's own website; other useful sources include commercial directories, industry profiles, news and trade journal articles, SEC filings, etc. Searching within a company's website may turn up information not available elsewhere, or information from a different viewpoint, but, as always, keep in mind the source of the information. For example, a company's newsletter may put a different interpretation on certain facts and events than news articles.

The type of information on a company site varies, but might include any of the following:

details about a company's products in the sales catalog
technical specifications about products in a customer service or support area
company divisions and subsidiaries, perhaps including specific contact names
biographies of executives
history of the company including previous reorganizations, mergers and acquisitions
locations of plants and facilities
clues about a company's strategy based on their marketing message, mission statement, or glossy annual report
easy links to press releases and SEC filing
links to outside industry sources, including relevant trade associations, provided by a known company in an industry of interest

Suggested methods for finding information within a known website:

1) Surf the navigational links on the home page of a site of interest. This could lead efficiently to the information sought, but the site's organization may be nonintuitive or incomplete.

2) If a useful site has been found through a search engine, check for a "more results from" or "more hits from" link. Most search engines now cluster results, showing only a couple of the most relevant pages in search results. The rest can be seen by clicking the "more hits" link.

3) If the company site offers a "search within this site" button, try that. There may be more information about what is actually being searched, by clicking a link to "Advanced search" near the search window, or on the results page after a search is performed. If additional choices are given, it may be possible to search only part of a large company's site.

4) Several general purpose search engines offer a "search within a domain," "restrict to this site," or "domain filter" feature to make it possible to search within just one site. This may not always do a better job than the site's own search engine, but it is a different way, and as such may prove more successful in any particular case. A site's own search system and that of the various general search engines vary as to which pages are indexed, how much of each page is indexed, what formats are indexed, and the order and relevancy of the results.

To find the name of the domain that you wish to search, pay attention to the web address, or URL, in your browser while viewing a page or surfing through a site of interest. The domain name is the part just before the first single slash of a URL (e.g., eipertinfo.com). A company may use only one domain name, or it may use different domain names to distinguish subsidiaries, localized country sites, or sales sites from their corporate site. For large companies especially, more than one domain name or site may need to be considered (e.g., boeing.com, boeing.de, boeing.com.au, boeingtravel.com).

The domain search procedure of the various general search engines is similar, but there are some confusing variations. (Do not include the quote marks in any of these examples.) The most consistent feature is that the following two methods can be used to do a basic domain search. Use a specific search syntax (e.g., "site:eipertinfo.com" along with the search term) in the regular search box, or use the domain/site search on an advanced search feature page. For example, put "site:eipertinfo.com cybercrime" in the search box at Google (http://google.com) to find the article about cybercrime on my website, or use Google's advanced search page (http://www.google.com/advanced_search) to search for "cybercrime" while including "eipertinfo.com" in the "domain" box.

Be sure to read the instructions to determine the exact syntax, and whether or not to use only the domain name (cnn.com), or whether to use the host name (sportsillustrated.cnn.com). This latter form will not work at all in some search engines, but in others may serve to narrow the search (compare Yahoo search results for "madrid" at http://search.yahoo.com/web/advanced while using "cnn.com" or "sportsillustrated.cnn.com" in the site/domain box).

Checking the advanced search pages and their help files will reveal other features. Alltheweb (http://alltheweb.com/advanced) allows searching within more than one domain at the same time. Some search engines allow a search to exclude specific domains.

5) For routine quick searching within websites, try using a free toolbar available from many of the search engines. The Google toolbar, for example, makes it very convenient to search the site currently being looked at without moving to a search page or remembering the proper search syntax.

These techniques of searching within websites can be useful for searching all types of sites, not just company sites--large sites from trade associations, universities and government agencies, and small sites that have no search engine of their own.

*** Contact Sue Eipert (seipert@eipertinfo.com) at Eipert Information Services for customized research of proprietary business and sci/tech databases, as well as the Internet, for marketing, R&D, strategic planning or litigation support. ***

Eipert Information Services
seipert@eipertinfo.com

Home - Sci/Tech - Market/Industry - Search Tips - About Us / Contact Us