I know you use a search engine, probably Google, for fun and research but do you know how to squeeze the secrets out of it?  Did you know, for example, that now when you search you are getting results that Google think are most relevant to you based on the keywords used and your location?

This means that if you are located in Texas the search engine results page is tailored to Texas, similarly the results for the same search terms in New Zealand will be tailored to New Zealand etc.  A good thing for you the searcher you might think and often it is, but not always.

The issue here is that Google doesn’t always get it right and when it gets it wrong it can be very wrong.  I currently am working for a large company in Australia, I am based in Australia but the company is owned by a Chinese company based in Hong Kong.  Google will regularly deliver results in Chinese and provides a helpful Chinese front end for my Blogger Blog, wich has been active since early 2000.

The story is very different if you are researching for a story or attempting to find who your major competitors might be for a particular theme.  You need to find out how to see the results your target market will see when they search for your main keywords.

Fortunately there is still a way to do that.  Do this now, open a new browser window and go to www.google.com they may default to .co.uk, .com.au, com.nz or something which of course proves the point.  No matter, click on the link at the right hand end of the search text field which is named Advanced Search.  Have a look at that.

You need to play in this area for a while.  Here you can search for country specific results, not state specific yet but possibly coming soon.  You can search for particular types of files, pdf, xls, doc, exe, zip and anything else you like.  You can search within another website, you can search by recency ie in the last week, up the last year.

This is worth investing some time in so you know how much more useful the advanced search can be.

I don’t use it all the time but I do use it when I want more in depth results and so should you.

Similar functionality is available in Yahoo and Bing.  There is a good chance that you can get somthing similar with most of the bigger search engin companies.