Long Day Searching

The Web is a wonderful place to find things. And to get abysmally lost. There is simply SO MUCH TO FIND. Even Google cannot return the most pinpointed answer to a query.
It’s late at night. It’s been a long – and interesting – day. I’ve gotten quite a lot accomplished, including a fair amount of research on some new topics, along with completing actual business and transactions via the web. I’m an ‘Online Girl’ (and sometimes an ‘Uptown Girl’, but less and less), and I prefer to conduct much of my day-to-day operations online.
It’s an amazing place, the World Wide Web. And it keeps getting bigger, broader, deeper. As a long-time proponent and surfer, I’ve chosen my favorite search engines and learned their individual nuances to help me find what I’m looking for in the least amount of time and typing. However, it seems to be getting tougher to ‘second guess’ the results or to predict what will rise to the top. This is a little alarming for someone in the marketing field who is supposed to understand SEO (search engine optimization) among other things.

But what it really boils down to for me is getting my work done more efficiently. I’m very, very narrow-focused in my searches. I need something specific and I need it now. Some piece of data to help me explain a client’s value, or define the market, or check a competitor – or just to learn. Some of the sites I visited today to get my job done:

Dun & Bradstreet – checking the telecom industry for a client…American Express – to pay some bills and check my merchant account…PRWeb - to check stats on a press release…Google, Altavista, LookSmart, Lycos, Hotbot, and Yahoo – to see how the press release fares in a general search…MoveOn.org – to request that my Senator, Diane Feinstein, join in a Censure of President Bush…several sites about non-profit grants, including the Henry Kaiser Family Foundation, to understand marketing distribution for a great documentary series on teenage sex called The Silence of Sex, by Pinch Me Films right here in Berkeley.

I looked at another hundred sites that I don’t have space to list here. I bet that you did too. And I finally found a REALLY COOL way to search and organize the results! VIVISIMO! Sounds like a classy Italian toast, doesn’t it? Well, it’s not. But it’s a ‘clustering’ technology that helps sort through the mass chaos of typical keyword search returns. Try it. You can even download it for free – and add it to your site. Which is what we’ll be doing as soon as my hardworking webmaster gets to that item on the list. Then use it to look for just what you need. Like us.

Donna