Knowing how to Google is much different than Googling. First off, typing in the appropriate phrases and operators can reduce search time if you don’t have to sift through a bunch of duds. Second, Google has a wide range of capabilities that are often ignored and neglected, capabilities that greatly improve the success of finding exactly what you’re looking for. Check out the modifiers listed below.

Basic Operators: Google has several basic modifiers designed to pare down what you are looking for.

Exact phrase: To maximize your search for an exact phrase, place the entire phrase in quotes.

Excluded words: Reduce results for words commonly associated with your search word by placing a negative sign on the word you want to exclude. For example, if searching for roller but not the word coaster, type roller –coaster into the search field.

Similar words: To find both a word and its synonyms, use of the tilde can increase results for all similar words. For example, type ~aircraft to find words like planes, helicopters, etc.

Multiple words: Avoid having to do multiple searches by placing an OR between two words you both want searched for with a root word, i.e. type car Honda OR Ford when you want information on both Honda and Ford cars.

Numerical ranges: Use ellipses to determine a range of numbers or time period. For example put in Harrison Ford 1975…1985 to find out about the actor during this time period.

Advanced Google Operators: Some nifty advanced modifiers can help you come up with what you’re looking for while letting you search in ways you didn’t know were possible.

Find meanings: Utilize the define: phrase to find the definitions of a word, for example define:calligraphy.

Site specific: When searching for only a specific type of site with specific information, type in the site: modifier. As an example, when searching through government sites for tax information type taxes site:gov to find just tax information on .gov websites.

Linked pages: If you need webpages that link to a particular website, type in the link: modifier to find all links to a particular site, i.e. link:www.ucla.com will pick up all sites that link to the University of California, Los Angeles website. Other useful modifiers include phonebook: to find residential phone listings; the stocks: modifier to find information on specific stocks, for example stocks:goog; weather: to find out info in any given city, i.e. weather:San Francisco; movie: to find out movie information; and flights: to find flights from one airport to another, for example flight:jfk bos.

SEO-Oriented Operators: One little known function of Google is that it lets you search through online documents for a title name or text reference on purpose, reducing the need to search through results that could come from anywhere in the document.

The allintitle: modifier seeks out all titles containing the exact words you are looking for. As an example, allintitle:horses and buggies will search through all documents containing the words horses and buggies in the title.

The allintext: modifier does the same search, yet through the text of the document. So allintext:horses and buggies brings up documents containing those exact words. To use the same kind of modifier to find the exact words in a URL, type in allinurl: followed by the words you’re looking for.

Calculator and Conversions: Google can also act as your personal calculator or conversion tool. To determine a calculation, plug in the equation into Google using the +,-,*, /, %, or ^. Google also performs advanced mathematics, including square roots, i.e. sqrt (25); and non-square roots, for example 4th root of 56. Use Google to find sin, cos, arctan, tan, or other functions by typing in sin(pi/7) or tan(4/5*pi). To use Google’s conversion function, type in in radians or in degrees after the equation. For example 4/5 in degrees or 56*.4 in radians will give you the equivalent. Other conversion modifiers include cm in foot (i.e. 45 cm in foot), C in F (i.e. 32 C in F), $ in pound, miles in league, mph in speed of light, and so forth. Try it yourself to find the many different conversion possibilities.

With a more than 60% share of the market, everybody knows that Google is the king of search. After its introduction, Microsoft Bing made a small push to steal search traffic, but, ultimtately, the site has done little to take away from Google’s superiority. Does this mean that there aren’t any other worthwhile places to do research on the internet? Of course not! You just have to know where to look.

With that in mind, ReputationDefender would like to present Five Research Tools BESIDES Google.

1) Wolfram|Alpha

When Wolfram|Alpha came out in May 2009, news media was quick to categorize the service as the all-mighty “Google Killer.” In reality, however, Wolfram|Alpha was never intended to be a real competitor to Google. After all, it’s not even really a search engine. Long before Bing started calling itself the “decision engine,” Wolfram|Alpha was making its mark as a “computational knowledge engine.”

Using a unique adaptive algorithm, Wolfram|Alpha’s long-term goal is “to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything.” In other words, Wolfram|Alpha might not be the place to go to find the nearest pizza place, but it is the place to go to find out the origin of the word pizza, the nutritional content of pizza, and the average mass of a slice.

So what can you use Wolfram|Alpha for? Math for one thing. From the simplest arithmetic to advanced logic, Wolfram|Alpha computes answers as fast as a calculator and with nifty graphics to boot. Wolfram|Alpha is also great for economics research, health and medicine, and finance.

2) USA.gov

Finding relevant information through the vast reaches of government beaurocracy is rarely easy. Luckily, there is a tool to help: USA.gov. USA.gov is an an interagency initiative administered by the U.S. General Services Administration’s Office of Citizen Services and Communications. The website went online in 2000 and was originally known as FirstGov.gov.

Using USA.gov, web searchers can find detailed information on a variety of topics, including government benefits and grants, jobs and education, and the criminal justice and legal system. Technically, USA.gov isn’t a search engine, but rather an information portal for government websites. Considering how far spread out most of this information is though, USA.gov is actually a really valuable tool.

3) Technorati

While Google has its own blog search option, there’s few websites better for searching the wide world of blogs than Technorati. Technorati indexes millions of blog posts everyday and ranks them according to their respective “authority.” According to the website, “Authority is calculated based on a site’s linking behavior, categorization and other associated data over a short, finite period of time. A site’s authority may rapidly rise and fall depending on what the blogosphere is discussing at the moment, and how often a site produces content being referenced by other sites.” In layman’s terms, Technorati offers access to the highest quality blog content on a variety of different subjects, from sports and technology to politics and entertainment.

4) One Riot

One Riot is a relatively new search engine that specializes in tracking information in realtime by crawling the links people share on social networking websites like Twitter and Digg. As the web becomes more and more social, it is increasingly useful for individuals to be able to access the most popular information of the moment. Granted, sometimes this doesn’t always produce the most relevant information, but if you want to know what everyone is talking about, One Riot is the place to be.

(One note: It seems like people who use the One Riot toolbar add-on have been having some trouble. I would recommend steering clear of it for now.)

5) Evri

Evri.com uses a process known as semantic search. Semantics is the study of finding meaning in language. So, naturally, semantic search is about using an understanding and knowledge of language to guide searches. Evri describes it like this: “technology automates connections between Web content by applying a more human-like understanding of the words on the page.”

Like One Riot, Evri features a wide range of realtime content, including up-to-date information from Twitter and other social networking websites. It also breaks down popular topics into additional relevant information through a series of filters.

Have you ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes at Google? What hidden secrets there are in the labyrinthine tunnels of the Googleplex? How Sergey Brin and Larry Page spend their days plotting their world takeover? Well now you can find out!

Tomorrow night at 9PM ET/PT, CNBC will be running a one-hour special called “Inside the Mind of Google.” The show promises to give viewers the “fascinating story of how two graduate students took a one-time research project and in barely a decade turned it into a global technological powerhouse.” In all seriousness, the special will not unfold like the latest Dan Brown novel, but it should give regular people who don’t live and work in the Silicon Valley a better understanding of how Google operates and why it has become the world’s leader in search.

Here’s an excerpt describing the special. For a full description, visit CNBC.

With nearly two billion searches being done on its website every day, Google has access to an unprecedented amount of information about its users. By what we search for online, by what we say in our email, by what we read and where we spend our time on the Internet, we each leave a remarkably detailed trail of information about ourselves. What are the implications? What, exactly, does Google do with all that information? Bartiromo presses Google executives on the issue and talks to privacy advocates who say the company’s accumulation of personal data may present a looming threat to its users.

If CNBC takes the right approach, this could be a very interesting special. By that, I mean, I hope they will ask some hard-hitting questions about Google’s privacy issues and not just be a fluff piece showing how “hip” and “cool” it is to work there. Of course, there’s no way to tell until it airs, so we’ll just have to wait until tomorrow night at 9PM ET/PT.

As early as 2001, web scientist Michael K. Bergman had concluded in a white paper for BrightPlanet that, “Public information on the deep Web is currently 400 to 550 times larger than the commonly defined World Wide Web.” In the eight years since, particularly with the explosion of social networking, there is no doubt that this number has increased substantially.

Since typical web surfers do not have the technical knowledge needed to find information in the invisible web, does that mean that you don’t have to worry about it? Definitely not. Although the information may not be accessible via search engine, if someone is bashing your name behind closed doors, they are still doing damage to your reputation. Furthermore, the goal of a search company like Google is to bring you the most relevant information on a subject. In order to achieve this goal, search engines are becoming more and more sophisticated every day. I would be surprised if, sometime in the very near future, much of the invisible web was not brought to the surface.

So what can you do about the invisible web? For one thing, you should always remember to tread carefully in password protected networks. Just because you use an anonymous username and you have your privacy settings set to the highest level, that does not mean you have a license to act irresponsibly. You must always think about what you’re saying before you post something to the web. Second, sign up for MyReputation from ReputationDefender. Our search agents are trained experts in crawling the visible and invisible web for mentions of you or your company. If someone is talking about you online, we’ll let you know.

To learn more about MyReptuation, or any of ReputationDefender’s other services, please call one of our customer support specialists today at 877-720-6488. Or, you can send us an e-mail inquiry.

Levinson Axelrod is one of the oldest and most prestigious consumer injury law firms in New Jersey. It has been in business since 1939 and has won more than $250 million for its clients in the last 5 years alone.

But you wouldn’t know that by looking at the Google results for the firm’s name.  If you search Google for “Levinson Axelrod” today, the fourth result is a site called “Levinson Axelrod Sucks” at levinsonaxelrod.net (intentionally not linked to avoid making it any more visible in a Google search).

The site is a gripe site built by Edward Heyburn, an employee fired in 2004.  The firm says that Heyburn was fired because he was planning to open his own firm.  Heyburn claims that he was caught in disagreements about the firm’s direction and feels that the firm is not living up to its image of the working man’s protector.

The site lists many alleged problems at the law firm. Heyburn’s site claims that some of the firm’s accomplishments (like “Super Lawyer” status) were actually paid advertising and not independent awards, and that the firm called him just to disrupt him when he was in the delivery room assisting his wife in labor.  The site also highlights recent courtroom losses by Levinson Axelrod lawyers — something that can’t be found on the firm’s official site.

To a consumer law firm, image is everything

A firm like Levinson Axelrod depends on clients who are willing to trust the firm with claims that might be worth millions of dollars. When deciding on which lawyers to pick, clients depend almost entirely on the firm’s image and reputation.

After all, you can’t judge the skill of lawyers just by their names alone — instead, potential clients want to hear about experiences other people have had with a firm, and evaluate the firm’s reputation in the community.  Law firms spend tends of thousands of dollars on branding and image maintenance just to make sure that customers get an impression of strength, skill, and experience in the courtroom.

But all of that careful branding can be undermined by Google.  Potential clients might look at the firm’s website to learn more. But informed consumers will also routinely search for the firm’s name in Google to find out what other people have had to say. They will look for other experiences — positive and negative — that are described on Google before entrusting any firm with a claim that could be worth millions.

Here, the “gripe site” lists many complaints about the law firm.  Some of them might be true, or all of them might be false.  But it’s certain that many consumers won’t take the time to sort out which allegations are true and false; there are plenty of personal injury lawyers in New Jersey, so why take a risk on Levinson Axelrod when there are other firms with pristine reputations?   Maybe consumers should spend more time evaluating the gripe site’s complaints, but for most consumers, any complaint is enough to cause them to just click onto the next law firm’s site.

The same is true for doctors, lawyers, contractors, construction companies, and almost any other service industry: customers rely on  reputation to make the decision to hire a service firm.  And today, Google is the number one source of reputation — whatever Google says about you is what consumers will think about you.

SEO was not enough

Levinson Axelrod has spent a lot of energy on making its website come up first in search engines (“search engine optimization” or “SEO”).  The firm name comes up first in searches for terms like “New Jersey Personal Injury Lawyer,” “NJ injury lawyers” and other targeted keywords.  These are keywords that are worth $20.00 – $30.00 per click because they are very likely to lead to high-paying clients.   One analytics tool estimates that this SEO is worth the same as $15,000 a month in online advertising — or $180,000 a year.

SEO is important, especially to firms that benefit from consumer traffic. But SEO didn’t stop one ex-employee from trashing the firm’s image.  Any potential client that searches Google for “Levinson Axelrod” sees the “Levinson Axelrod Sucks” site right on the first page of results — and right below the firm’s official site. All that SEO value is undermined every time a potential client starts to do his or her due diligence on the firm, starting by searching for more information about the firm through Google.

SEO is designed only to get one or two pages to the top of a Google search; it is not designed to protect a brand or image online.

A lawsuit was not enough

The law firm has sued the ex-employee.  It should come as no surprise that a lawyer saw this problem as a lawsuit waiting to happen.

But the lawsuit hasn’t solved their problem: the web page is still up while they wrangle it out in court.  In fact, the legal conflict has actually drawn more attention to the website: a story of high-powered lawyers fighting each other is a guaranteed draw for reporters (see the Streisand Effect). And, of course, the ex-employee has every incentive to play up the media angle as much as possible.

Online monitoring and Google management: A better answer

If SEO and litigation aren’t enough, what is?  Comprehensive monitoring and Google image management that will push truthful positive information to the top of search results for queries related to your company name or brand.  If positive information fills all the top spots in a search, then false and disparaging information will never appear.

Proactive Google management now — before something goes wrong — can help keep false and negative information from ever reaching the front page of a Google search.  Building positive, truthful content today can block many types of negative information from ever appearing on the first page of a search.  It’s almost like a form of “Google-proofing” your brand — an investment today can stop damage in the future.  And if false information never appears on the front page, then it won’t have power to undermine your brand or spark a media frenzy.  In the case of an former employee’s complaint site, a hidden complaint site is like the ex-employee shouting into the wind: they might spend a lot of energy and vent a bit, but it is not likely to damage your brand.

Learn how you can use tools like MyEdgePro to protect your company’s image from attack today; visit http://www.reputationdefender.com/myedgepro or contact ReputationDefender for more information.

Yesterday, Google rolled out its latest search innovation. Dubbed Google Social Search, the new feature integrates public content from your online social circle into search results. Check out this demo video from Google to see Social Search in action.

On its face, Social Search is another interesting step toward realizing Google’s goal of fully personalized search results. Many in the social media sphere, such as Ars Technica, have praised the feature for bringing more relevant and useful information to search. Still others, however, have reacted more negatively. In a recent column for Computerworld, David Coursey explained why Social Search gives him the “creeps,” saying,

“I am not accusing Google of doing anything illegal or even fattening. But, the company is gathering huge amounts of information about every user and has the ability, inclination, and economic incentives to turn it into minutely detailed profiles of what who we are, what we do, and how we think.

Google isn’t alone in this, just looking at my Facebook and Twitter posts would tell you a lot about me. Still, Google is in a class of its own and I am concerned that current law and practice doesn’t provide enough protection for either privacy or individual liberty.

By giving us “free stuff” like e-mail, voice mail, search results, applications, collaboration, analytics, etc., Google knows more about us than we may easily be able to remember about ourselves. And Google never forgets.

Today, that’s not a problem (that we know of). Tomorrow, we may come to wish we’d stopped Google in its tracks and placed limits on its ability to aggregate personal information.”

So, what should YOU think about Social Search?

Social Search may indicate Google is one step closer to world dominance, but that’s not the most important issue right now. The question you should be asking is, “What does this mean for my online reputation?” From a privacy perspective, Social Search doesn’t provide users with any information that isn’t already accessible online. Rather, Social Search just makes that information easier to find. Of course, you might not want your information to be easy to find and therein lies the problem.

If you think that that spontaneous blog post you wrote three years ago complaining about your job/spouse/neighbor won’t be seen by anyone, think again. As search tools continue to evolve, it’s becoming easier and easier for individuals to access deeply buried content. In other words, you should always think before you post anything to the Internet. The web is not a closed community. If you put something online, you should expect that people are going to see it. Google, Bing, and other search engines exist to make web content easier to find. Make sure they find web content that you’re proud of.

This morning, the popular tech blog Engadget shared a fairly remarkable development regarding Google Voice, Google’s seven-month old telecommunications service. Apparently, Google has accidentally been indexing voice mails from Google Voice into public search results. The messages, which can be found by searching site:https://www.google.com/voice/fm/* in Google, range from calls made several months ago to calls made yesterday.

While many of the recorded messages are test calls, and therefore do not present a real privacy threat, there are a number of voicemails that contain actual calls from individuals who (rightfully) assumed they were leaving private messages for friends and family. How upset would you be if you heard your voice repeated back to you via a simple Internet search?

It is difficult to imagine a more gross violation of your privacy than having your calls recorded and shared on the world’s largest public search engine. While Google claims to have fixed this particular issue, there is no telling when something like this could happen again. As technology continues to evolve and become more complex, the likelihood that accidents such as this will occur only increases. The best way to ensure your private information stays secure is to be vigilant in monitoring and managing your name online.

Earlier today, we outlined how Google has finally acknowledged the importance of Online Reputation Management. In a post at the search giant’s Official Blog, Google advises web surfers to:

1) Think twice before putting your personal information online.

2) Contact webmaster to try to remove negative content from the site where it’s appearing.

3) Proactively publish useful, positive information about yourself or your business online.

Unfortunately, Google’s advice, while undeniably useful, is overly simplistic and vastly underestimates the considerable effort that goes into effectively managing one’s reputation online. Does the average web user really know how to find the contact information for the webmaster of a site? Do they know how to write strong, compelling copy that launches to the top of page one? Sadly, the answer is no. People need help managing their reputations online, which is why ReputationDefender exists today.

It is disappointing that, after finally deciding to wade into the reputation management discussion, Google has come out so flatly. For a company that has so much control over how the Internet functions, one would expect Google to present its users with better and more nuanced wisdom.  While Google certainly isn’t the reason that libel and slander exist online (that’s a result of our own inability as a society to treat each other respectfully), the company could do far more to reduce the visibility of clearly false and defamatory content.

Improving your online reputation calls for real, tangible results. If this is what you need, it’s time to bring in the
experts.

ON REMOVING CONTENT

• If the content in question is on a site you own, easy — just remove it. It will naturally drop out of search results after we recrawl the page and discover the change.
• It’s also often easy to remove content from sites you don’t own if you put it there, such as photos you’ve uploaded, or content on your profile page.
• If you can’t remove something yourself, you can contact the site’s webmaster and ask them to remove the content or the page in question.

After you or the site’s webmaster has removed or edited the page, you can expedite the removal of that content from Google using our URL removal tool.

ON PROMOTING CONTENT

• Create a Google profile. When people search for your name, Google can display a link to your Google profile in our search results and people can click through to see whatever information you choose to publish in your profile.
• If a customer writes a negative review of your business, you could ask some of your other customers who are happy with your company to give a fuller picture of your business.
• If a blogger is publishing unflattering photos of you, take some pictures you prefer and publish them in a blog post or two.
• If a newspaper wrote an article about a court case that put you in a negative light, but which was subsequently ruled in your favor, you can ask them to update the article or publish a follow-up article about your exoneration. (This last one may seem far-fetched, but believe it or not, we’ve gotten multiple requests from people in this situation.)

While it’s great to finally have Google officially promoting pro-active Online Reputation Management, I believe that their advice is somewhat oversimplified. Susan is exactly right when she says that people should contact the site’s webmaster before they contact Google if they are attempting to remove negative content. However, contacting a webmaster isn’t always easy. It’s not as if every website on the Internet has a blinking red button that says “Click Here to Complain.”

If a site has been abandoned, it can take hours or days even to track down the person responsible for it. Not everyone has the technical proficiency or time to go jump over all of those hurdles, which is why so many people have turned to us here at ReputationDefender. On our MyReputation team, we have a dedicated and experienced group of professionals who know all the ins and outs of removing content from the web.

As to promoting content, Google’s advice is similarly well-intentioned, but weak. If a blogger posts pictures of you, you could combat it by posting your own, but what if the blog in question gets thousands of hits a day and has a very strong page rank. To defeat deeply entrenched content on the web, a person would have to understand the importance of keywords, link strategies, domain registration, and more. For most web surfers, the time and effort required to successfully promote their positive content on the web is too much to handle on their own, which is why we developed MyEdge. Since taking on our first MyEdge customer, we have helped countless men and women from around the globe share their good names online.

We would all be much happier if it were easy to repair and promote reputations online, but that’s not how it works. Perhaps as the web continues to evolve, it will become easier to manage information online, but, until then, if you have a problem with how your name appears online, make sure you have an expert on your side.