Get the most out of search

Seek, and ye shall find. Well, that was the theory. The past reality, when it came to searching print reference sources like directories for information on new suppliers, products, and processes was always more prosaic and involved a certain amount of luck. The information was out there, all right—but the effort involved in tracking it down often was too disproportionate to the likely return.

For many businesses, word-of-mouth recommendations, trade shows, and watching competitors were usually better bets.

A single word has changed that: Google, which is fast becoming one of those brand names that define a product space, in much the same way Scotch Tape, Kleenex, Band-Aid, and Xerox do. In everyday conversation, to "google" something is verbal shorthand for "use an Internet search engine."

By now, the Google story is well known. Back in 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two friends from Stanford University, rewrote the book on first-mover advantage. In a market already crowded with Internet search engines, they launched a search engine with a difference: it incorporated fancy algorithms that produced much, much better results.

Type a phrase into Google, and it's quite likely the answer you want will be the one at the top of the page. Search engines didn't always do that. Perhaps arrogantly—or at the least very confidently—the youthful founders equipped the Google home page with two "search" buttons: one that throws up every result ("Google Search"), and one that just throws up the first and most likely hit ("I'm feeling lucky"). Imagine, in 1998, Yahoo! doing that.

While competitors were spending a fortune on advertising, Google's fame spread largely by word of mouth.

Google worked, and once people found that out, they didn't revert back to whatever search engine they'd used before. Yahoo!—preeminent among Internet search engines at the time—was knocked off its throne and was forced to rely on other strategies, thus becoming a consumer portal and offering varied services.

Despite the hype surrounding Google's successful IPO on August 19, which controversially took the form of a public auction, there's a Google story that hasn't yet been told. Google also is a management tool with a popularity that matches its success among consumers. And in the process, Google has begun to reinvigorate the whole search industry, both on the Internet and outside it.

A common experience among businesses using Google's search facilities is that it levels the playing field—or, put another way, allows them to punch above their weight. "Undoubtedly, search engines and the Internet have changed the way we access information, and our daily lives wouldn't be the same without them," says Greg Harding, supply chain manager at Wellingborough, U.K.-based Sarantel, a small but award-winning manufacturer of antennas for mobile wireless devices.

Using Google, Harding explains, is faster and easier than looking something up in a book or catalog, and "although there are many other media sources available, most just aren't as fast or as flexible," he says. In particular, he adds, he prefers Google to using fee-based search engines. "We could subscribe to them, certainly, but I've never really seen the value."

For Harding, the secret of success is the search engine equivalent of the old "GIGO" computer adage: garbage in, garbage out. In other words, he explains, "The key is to use the right search terms."

It's a lesson most search engine proprietors probably wish their users were more familiar with. While nearly every search engine has a page or two of advice on how to construct a search term, most users never read it, preferring instead to just type something in, and click. The upside is that their search will probably work—in that something useful will show up—but the downside is that the nugget you really wanted may be obscured by a tidal wave of near misses and almost-rights.

A common mistake "is to assume that a search engine like Google will find everything that's out there: it won't," says Greg Notess, a reference librarian at Montana State University, and proprietor of Searchengineshowdown.com, a Web site devoted to comparing and reviewing search engines. "It's a fallacy: Google just doesn't index every term on every page on every Web site," he says.

Another common mistake, adds Notess, is to assume that Google always is better than its competitors. "Despite all the attention that surrounds Google," he says, "other search engines will come up with information that you just won't locate with Google—simply because they rank, or index, pages in a different way from Google."

Notess advises using more than one search engine. There are plenty to choose from, including Lycos, Yahoo!, LookSmart, Ask Jeeves, Gigablast, and Teoma. Among Notess' favorite recommendations is Yahoo! ("Still the primary competitor to Google at this point in time") and Teoma.

More specifically, Notess offers two tips to improve the quality of search results. First, use the "advanced search" facility. "It's better," he enthuses. Most search engines offer the ability to construct more detailed search terms built around more than just a few keywords. Those familiar with Boolean logic won't find it difficult, but even the most techno phobic will find the effort pays for itself, reckons Notess.

Second, use quote marks when searching for specific phrases. Type Joe Smith into Google, and you'll get pages that contain the words "Joe" and "Smith"—appearing anywhere on those pages. But they could be pages about "Joe Brown" and "Fred Smith." Putting quotes around the phrase "Joe Smith" forces Google to come up with just pages containing the two words "Joe" and "Smith" next to each other. Other search engines work the same way. "It's just amazing how many people don't know about those quote marks," chuckles Notess.

Google itself makes another suggestion: use its directory service, which groups information into broad categories. Launching a search from within one of these categories only delivers hits that come from pages within the category in question—ideal for business users who want to see business-related pages. Launch the search term "Saturn" from within the Astronomy subdirectory of Google's Science category, for example, and you'll see pages relating to Saturn, the planet. Launch the same search from within the Automotive category, and you'll only see information regarding Saturn automobiles. To locate Google's directory, go to http://directory.google.com (note: there's no "www" required).

But there's another way in which Google is revolutionizing the business of finding new suppliers, products, and technologies. In addition to indexing Web sites, Google also accepts paid advertisements, displaying these on the right-hand side of the screen, alongside the search results. At one time these might have been considered an irritation. No longer: in the same way Google throws up Web pages people want to see, Google also has a handy knack of throwing up companies that sell items you're looking for.

What advertisers are latching onto, says Erin Clift, Google's Chicago-based industrial markets specialist, is that people who click on those advertisements are qualified leads, and that the act of clicking and viewing generally moves those sales leads a few stages along the buying process. Even better prospects are those people who take a positive action such as downloading a white paper or some software, or register their interest in being contacted.

"Distributors have a fairly short buy cycle; people typically need something and are looking for somewhere to buy it. Manufacturers have a longer buy cycle. But whatever the business, the act of browsing a Web site that you've clicked onto following an advertisement shows that people are interested in the product and moves them along the buying cycle," says Clift.

What's more, she adds, manufacturers are beginning to see Google as part of their approach to globalization. "In the industrial marketplace, companies are doing more and more business overseas," she notes. The problem is finding the right business connections.

Along with its directory structure, Google also has national sites—something else that American users often don't know. The advertisers and page views that appear on www.Google.co.uk (the British Google) for example, are very different from those that show up on Google.com. Getting hold of paper-based national directories is a pain, but www.google.fr (Google France); www.google.de (Google Germany); and www.google.it (Google Italy) are a mere click away.

Google has done more than revolutionize Web search. "Google has changed the way we think about search technology, period," says Gregg Le Blanc, director of product marketing at performance management systems supplier OSIsoft, adding, "It almost renders taxonomies of data useless." In other words, what's the point of a carefully constructed hierarchy of information, he asks, when users can dive straight into the information that they want?

And for proof, Le Blanc points to Microsoft's SharePoint technology, which is transforming the way OSIsoft customers are storing and retrieving data within their own operations. "It's not Google, but it's Google-like," he says. "It's about storing the data on a portal, and then deploying search technology within that portal." One example proffered by Le Blanc: storing process automation variables, and then searching for every document affected by a name change of one. "Even a medium-size refinery might have 100,000 named variables—it's quite a challenge," he says.

More particular, explains Mike Fitzmaurice, SharePoint technologies product manager at Microsoft, the technology in question actually is two technologies working in combination: Windows SharePoint Services, which is part of Office 2003, and SharePoint Portal Server 2003. "It's about providing a single point of access to an organization's people, team knowledge, and application resources," he says. Virtually everything is grist for the mill: PowerPoint, Word, Excel, Access—even data extracted from enterprise applications such as PeopleSoft and SAP. Based on the popular OKAPI search algorithm, he adds, "It lets you index and make searchable the organization's entire store of knowledge."

In such circumstances, Google's approach to search—through cross-referencing—doesn't work so well, claims Fitzmaurice. "OKAPI looks at factors such as how frequently search terms occur in a document, how close together they are, and things like that. It's a different approach."

But Google isn't rolling over yet. On October 14, the company released a version of its search program designed for PCs, retrieving from the hard drive documents and page views from Internet Explorer. "If there's anything you once saw on your computer screen, we think you should be able to find it again quickly," concludes Marissa Mayer, Google director of consumer Web products.