Using and Abusing Search to Your Advantage

Using and Abusing Search to Your Advantage

By: Aamir Syed, Account Coordinator, Fusion PR

Thursday evening, Friday morning, Friday afternoon, and Friday evening was the time period where I was planning on celebrating a never-before comeback of a 1-3 deficit, winning another championship, and bringing the prized Larry O’Brien trophy back to Los Angeles.

Instead, went to Las Vegas.

But while in Vegas, I came across a blog that might be very insightful for all of us at Fusion.

As an account coordinator, and as an avid internet browser, I am constantly browsing the web, and searching through numerous pages for product and client coverage, press releases, Laker articles, shoes, fashion, design, and probably more shoes…

More so than most of my other friends and fellow internet addicts, I am a strong advocate of Google search, and finding everything through Google. They are on the verge of ruling the world anyway, right? Apparently not…well, not effectively at least, according to Laura Milligan in her article “100 Useful Niche Search Engines You’ve Never Heard Of.”

Specifically talking about search techniques used for college students, she lists different categories and the best search sites to use. She goes through the following:

• Extracurricular: Blogs, games, and forums
• Quick Answer Guides
• City Guides/Travel
• Shopping
• Business
• Academic
• Social Media and People
• Multi-search: shared searches and more complex findings
• TV, Video and Radio
• Medical
• Law
• Metasearch and Megasearch
• Photos and Images
• News
• Jobs and Real Estate

Clearly, some of these are irrelevant for many of us at Fusion. But there are a few subjects that she highlights, that would totally help us in our search efforts, and potentially allow our efforts to be far more efficient. (see highlighted)

Here are some mentions that I think I will start using.

Omgili – A blog search where you type in a subject or a keyword and it’ll find forum posts and discussions on the same topic.
– www.omgili.com

Similicio.us – Paste a URL in, and it’ll spit out similar sites with the same type of content. This will help with finding more sites to pitch to!
– www.similicio.us

MsFreckles – Allows you to search the whole internet, just the UK, or specified regions and filtering options. For example, you can search only certain domains, only blogs, or even a particular file type if need be.
– www.msfreckles.com

Myriad Search – A complete way of searching per say. It lets you combine multiple search engines like Google and Yahoo and put their results together on one page.
– www.myriadsearch.com

In the LA office, our clients all seem to get busy at the same time, hence creating very very hectic and tedious days. Specialized searches will surely help us in getting better results, faster.

On that note…

Search away.