Article
Two: Finding Information on the web by Darren Revell
In his last article, Michael looked at ways of identifying candidates by
finding their CV's on the Web. Now he will look at ways of identifying both candidates and business contacts by finding their
information within an organisation's web site.
Once again, the first thing you have to do is to choose the best
Search Engine for the job. No two search engines are the same, so choosing the right ones to use is imperative. Remember though, to do a
thorough search of the WWW, you must learn to use multiple search engines, as different engines will find you different results. The
ones I recommend are:
www.altavista.com
www.google.com
www.alltheweb.com
In my previous article (issue 142) we looked at the advanced 'field
search' options available on the major search engines and again we will be utilizing these skills to maximize the accuracy of our
results.
The first thing we must consider is where we are likely to find the
information that we are looking for. The best places to start are staff directories and Press Releases.
We will use www.altavista.com/web/adv
for our search. This is the advanced search section for Altavista.
Finding Staff Directories
There are certain keywords that would identify an online staff directory; these words include staff, team and people. Where we find
these words in our results page is also of some importance to ensure
that irrelevant results are kept to a minimum.
Lets say we are looking for qualified accountants that are ACA, FCA or
ACCA affiliated. Our search string would look like this:
(title:staff OR url:staff) AND accountant AND (aca OR fca OR
acca)
Also, try experimenting with a variety of possible directory
descriptions when constructing your search; each variation of phrase
used will bring back new results.
(title:"staff directory" OR title:"management team" OR title:"staff
list")
Finding Press Releases
Press Releases, Success Stories and Case Studies give an organization
the opportunity to say 'look at us, look at what we have done'. They
often contain a great deal more information than you would at first imagine and can prove an invaluable source of information.
There are certain keywords that will help us identify press releases,
these would include "press release", "case study" and "success stories"
Lets say, we are looking to find information about SAP implementations
and we are looking to find the contacts to call. Our search string would look like this:
(url:success OR title:"press release") AND sap
What you will find, is that we start finding SAP implementation
stories that are not restricted to official releases from SAP. We will
start to find information from many different implementation partners.
Alternatively, you can use this technique to find specific individuals
within an organisation.
Lets say you are looking to find the HR Director for Babtie
Engineering and we cannot find them in an online Staff Directory. Our
search string would look like this:
(url:press OR title:press) AND "hr director" AND "babtie engineering"
Article provided by Darren Revell of Attract Spider.
http://www.attract-spider.com
(a version of this article was published in the newsletter in
January 2004)
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