New Tricks: Use expanded Google search as a reporting tool

May 13th, 2009

If you’re a reporter or editor, you know that you have to do a bit of tweaking in your Web searches to find exactly what you’re looking for. Sometimes it’s easy to find a static Web page, but finding sentiment about a topic may be tricky.

As a result, Google has announced the release of a bigger search toolkit. When you do a search, try clicking the “Show Options” link that appears right below the search box once the initial results page comes up.

If you were to do a search for “Daniel Honigman” this page will come up. (As you can see, I’m not too exciting.)

You can find my name mentioned on Web sites, in videos and in forums. For you, this is a great opportunity for you to find groups of people talking about your idea; these are potentially the same people who may be linking to your story when it’s published.

The “reviews” results are a bit tricky for search terms that aren’t reviewable, like your name — unless your supervisor posts your employee reviews publicly — but for products and services, the new Google search appears to be spot-on.

Try a few of these searches out. Please let me know if this works.

Here’s a quick explanatory video from Google: