Use Search Engines to Research Your Business Ideas
By Dan Boudreau
The most common cause of business plan failure is inadequate market research. Yet it’s never been easier or cheaper to access research tools and information. This article is about using search engines to dig up the dirt on your business idea, your market and your industry. And the real beauty is that all of the links mentioned in this article are free to use.
If you’re on the web and not using Google or some of the other popular search engines to locate information, you should probably have your pulse checked. Likewise, if you haven’t clued into Wikipedia as a significant source of information and knowledge, it’s time to stroll over to Wikipedia.com and take a peek. These two tools alone will bring you a goldmine of research, but depending on the type of information you’re looking for, there are scads of other options as well.
Not all search engines are created equal, and there is an abundance to choose from. Most popular are the general search engines, including Google, Bing and Baidu. According to Net Marketshare, in December 2010, rankings of the market share of web search engines showed Google at 84.65%, Yahoo at 6.69%, Baidu at 3.39%, Bing at 3.29% and other at 1.98%.
For example, of increasing importance is a family of tools called social search engines. At whostalkin.com my keyword search for “business planning” pulled up nearly 300 links to relevant conversations from a range of social networking sites. At SocialMention.com the same keyword search turned up comments from social websites across the Internet; it also provided ratings on the comments’ general sentiment, strength, passion and reach. It also informed me of the number of users making comments, the top keywords used, and the sources of the comments.
With a couple of clicks you can find search engines that narrow your focus to forums, blogs, multimedia, email, maps, prices, and question-and-answer sites that spin out both human and automatically generated responses to your queries. Here are a few search options to explore.
1. Forums. Use Omgili.com (Oh my God I love it!) to search websites that host forums, and pick up on conversation threads referencing your keyword topics.
2. Blogs. Try Technorati.com to scour the web for blog posts on your choice of keywords.
3. Multimedia. Go to Bing.com/videos/browse or Video.google.com to comb the Internet for videos.
4. News. Searching on news.google.ca will pull up news articles on the topics of your choice.
5. Maps. Visit Maps.google.com to locate or get directions to anywhere.
Of course, no discussion about searching is complete without a mention of the search functions found at most websites. This includes resources like the Federal Government’s Industry Canada website at www.ic.gc.ca, the Statistics Canada website at www.statcan.gc.ca, the Provincial Government’s BCStats website at www.bcstats.gov.bc.ca, and the local library at www.lib.pg.bc.ca. Using the search function at any of these sites is sure to pull up scads of local information not readily available through the general search engines.
A great starting place to learn more about the growing number of search options at your fingertips is right at Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines or Google using the keywords, “Wiki, list of search engines”.
A business plan should never falter due to a lack of market research. It’s a matter of getting out there and learning.
You are welcome to publish this article providing you attach this statement with the link back to the RiskBuster website:
“Dan Boudreau is President and CEO of Macrolink Action Plans Inc. and the RiskBuster Business Plan Oasis at http://www.riskbuster.com Writing your own business plan can be easy, fast and fun! Instantly download a free copy of Dan’s popular fast-track business plan template, The Shell™, when you subscribe to the RiskBuster Business Plan Insider at http://www.riskbuster.com”
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