Google Advanced Search
Every web search engine has a set of advanced features that almost nobody ever uses, just because they’re hidden behind a link beneath the ‘search’ button labelled “Advanced” or “Options”. I often wonder if everyone would use them if the link label was something like “More useful things” or maybe “Free beer.” For the time being, that remains but a dream.
Still, there are jewels to be found there, if only we take the time to dig. For instance, did you know you can use Google to search for all the websites that link to yours, or even for all the web pages that link to specific web pages on your website? This can be very handy indeed, turning up other websites that recommend you to their customers, clients blogging about how good you are, or even online media writing about you, some of which you know about, some of which you probably don’t.
First, click on that “Advanced” link next to the search box you’d usually type your keyword into. On the boring page that follows, scroll about three-quarters down and click on the exceedingly-boring-sounding “Date, usage rights, numeric range, and more” link. Under the now-revealed “Page-specific tools” try typing the name of your website or its URL into the form labelled “Find pages that link to the page”. If there are other websites out there that link to yours, Google will list them.
But Google isn’t the whole world
Google isn’t the only search engine in the world and by focusing your time on Google you’re missing out on what MSN and Yahoo! users are doing, but just as pollsters only sample a few hundred people when determining what people think of Government policy, the Google audience is a good representative sample of the internet audience as a whole. So use Google’s free tools for your market research, and apply those learnings to marketing on all the new online marketing platforms, including Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, Facebook and Twitter, amongst others.
