Whois Microsoft.com
Whois Microsoft.com
Top Seven Ways to Research a Company or Brand Online
When you need to research a company, product, or brand online, you can improve your results and spend less time by employing the seven suggestions below.
1. Search Engines – Google / Yahoo: the simple and the complex
Of course, you already know to use Search Engines such as Google and Yahoo. But, make sure you take full advantage of these tools. If you have never used the “advanced features” of Google then you are limiting your ability to discover the information you want.
Most of the below is common sense, but you may not have seen it written out before. It helps to have a disciplined approach when searching, and by reading below you can get an idea of how to perform extremely useful searches.(Type each line below into Google’s search box. If you want to narrow results to include only the ENTIRE phrase then type quotation marks around what you type into Google’s search box).
The key is to drill down to the information you want by adding one keyword at a time, and then comparing the results of multiple searches to determine what keywords best drill down to the appropriate answer.
A common progression might be, for instance, to answer the question; “Who is in charge of energy related investments at General Electric?”
• General Electric
• General Electric Energy
• General Electric Energy CEO
• General Electric Energy Alex Urquhart
• Start with a search for only the company’s name, i.e. “CompanyA”.
Use Google’s advanced features to perform specialized queries, progressively narrowing down keywords as you discover more information.
Here are some examples of how to search for a fake company, CompanyA, on google.com (Yahoo has similar search options available at yahoo.com).
• CompanyA lawsuit
• CompanyA litigation
• CompanyA profit
• CompanyA profile
• CompanyA board members
• CompanyA board member name
You can use google’s operators, such as OR, NOT (-), AND, etc. to create highly specific queries to discover the information you need.
• CompanyA litigation OR lawsuit -CompanyB –shareholder
• Detailed example:
• google litigation OR lawsuit AND federal -microsoft -shareholder
From your previous searches, find out all the legal and popular names the company might use and search for those terms as well. Include stock tickers if the company is public.
• For instance, ADM instead of Archer-Daniels Midland.
• ADM lawsuit
• ADM litigation NOT lawsuit
• ADM lawsuit OR litigation AND federal.
• ADM litigation OR lawsuit AND federal –insider -shareholder
2. Branch out from Google and Yahoo:
Try these same searches on other search engines, 3rd party search sites, widgets, or semantic type search engines. Pick your favorites and book mark them.
- http://www.rollyo.com
- http://www.ask.com
- http://www.live.com
- http://www.excite.com
- http://www.gigablast.com
- http://www.altavista.com
- http://www.hotbot.com
- http://search.aol.com
- http://www.alltheweb.com
- http://search.about.com
- http://www.mnemo.org/
- http://www.keotag.com/
- http://www.sortfix.com
- http://www.ebingbong.com
- http://www.silobreaker.com
- http://www.clusty.com
3. Charitable Search Engines
If you want a charity to profit off your searching visit one of the charitable search engines. Some work pretty well as aggregators of multiple search engine results and they donate some of their proceeds to charity. Maybe it doesn’t save you time, but at least someone probably benefits from it. Don’t think you could deduct it from your taxes though.
- NOTE: I didn’t verify anything about these websites except that they returned a few basic search results that mimicked other results that I usually use. You might want to research which of these you think the most legitimate. Assuming you care. Plus there are probably more out there just like these:
- http://www.goodsearch.com
- http://www.charitycafe.com
- http://www.earchkindly.org
- http://www.letthemknowitschristmas.com
You’ve done a lot if you have already peformed the searches above, but there are still many more options for research. If you think you need a quick break while searching,
Check out the talking search engine over at http://www.msdewey.com. Mostly, you’ll get the same results as elsewhere, but you might laugh.
If you still need a laugh, go to http://www.zombo.com and make sure your sound is turned on.
Now back to serious researching:
4. Check the company’s main website, and the Whois information.
• Use domaintools.com: http://whois.domaintools.com/example.com
• Just change example.com to whatever domain you want to research.
• Check out the Public Relation or News sections of the company’s website.
5. You can search on Aboutus.org, Wikipedia, Yahoo directory, BBB.com, GetSatisfaction, Consumerist, and other consumer oriented sites for specific information.
• http://www.aboutus.org
• http://www.wikipedia.com
• http://directory.yahoo.com
• http://dnb.com - Duns and Bradstreet
• http://www.bbb.com - Better Business Bureau
• http://www.getsatisfaction.com
• http://www.consumerist.com
• http://www.businesswire.com
6. Search website traffic rankings for companies at Alexa, Compete.com, Quantcast. The compete.com blog also has some excellent write-ups about various companies.
- http://www.alexa.com
- http://www.compete.com
- http://www.quantcast.com
You can try searching google with “companyA site:compete.com” to narrow google results down to compete.com pages, many of which are the blog entries.
7. If the company is publicly traded then the Securities Exchange Commission and other regulatory agencies provide a wealth of information that is publicly available. This information is posted on EDGAR, but you can most easily find it at common sources such as:
- http://finance.yahoo.com
- http://money.msn.com
- http://www.motleyfool.com
- http://www.investors.com - Investor's Business Daily
There is a firefox extension called SEOpen that allows you to have a right-click ability to perform several of the queries above. If you use firefox you should get it.
- https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/570
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About the Author
While working for many years in various technology and business executive positions, I learned what works and what doesn't on the web.
Whois Microsoft.com
Microsoft's Senior Director of Product Management for BPOS, Eron Kelly at WPC 2010 - PART 1 of 2
Learning How Search Engines See Websites
At Google, search engineers talk about "80-20" problems. They are describing situations where the last 20 percent of the problem is 80 percent of the work. Learning SEO is one of these problems. Eighty percent of the knowledge SEOs need is available online for free.
Unfortunately, the remaining 20 percent takes the majority of the time and energy to find and understand. My goal with this Post is to solve this problem by making the last 20 percent as easy to get as the first 80 percent.This Post is for those who already know the basics of SEO and are looking to take their skills to the next level.
The Secrets of Popularity
Once upon a time there were two nerds at Stanford working on their PhDs.(Now that I think about it, there were probably a lot more than two nerds at Stanford.) Two of the nerds at Stanford were not satisfied with the current options for searching online, so they attempted to develop a better way. Being long-time academics, they eventually decided to take the way academic papers were organized and apply that to webpages. A quick and fairly objective way to judge the quality of an academic paper is to see how many times other academic papers have cited it. This concept was easy to replicate online because the original purpose of the Internet was to share academic resources between universities. The citations manifested themselves as hyperlinks once they went online. One of the nerds came up with an algorithm for calculating these values on a global scale, and they both lived happily ever after. Of course, these two nerds were Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, and the algorithm that Larry invented that day was what eventually became PageRank. Long story short, Google ended up becoming a big deal and now the two founders rent an airstrip from NASA so they have somewhere to land their private jets.
That fateful day, the Google Guys capitalized on the mysterious power of links. Although a webmaster can easily manipulate everything (word choice, keyword placement, internal links, and so on) on his or her own website, it is much more difficult to influence inbound links. This natural link profile acts as an extremely good metric for identifying legitimately popular
pages.
Domain and Page Popularity
There are hundreds of factors that help engines decide how to rank a page. And in general, those hundreds of factors can be broken into two categories—relevance and popularity (or "authority"). For the purposes of this demonstration you will need to completely ignore relevancy for a second. (Kind of like the search engine Ask.com.) Further, within the category of popularity, there are two primary types—domain popularity and page popularity. Modern search engines rank pages by a combination of these two kinds of popularity metrics. These metrics are measurements of link profiles. To rank number one for a given query you need to have the highest amount of total popularity on the Internet. (Again, bear with me as we ignore relevancy for this section.) This is very clear if you start looking for patterns in search result pages. Have you ever noticed that popular domains like Wikipedia.org tend to rank for everything? This is because they have an enormous amount of domain popularity. But what about those competitors who outrank me for a specific term with a practically unknown domain? This happens when they have an excess of page popularity.
Although en.wikipedia.org has a lot of domain popularity and get.adobe.com/reader/ has a lot of page popularity, www.awesome.com ranks higher because it has a higher total amount of popularity. This fact and relevancy metrics are the essence of Search Engine Optimization.
Popularity Top Ten Lists
The top 10 most linked-to domains on the Internet (at the time of writing) are:
Google.com
Adobe.com
Yahoo.com
Blogspot.com
Wikipedia.org
YouTube.com
W3.org
Myspace.com
WordPress.com
Microsoft.com
The top 10 most linked-to pages on the Internet (at the time of writing) are:
http://wordpress.org/
http://www.google.com/
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html
http://www.miibeian.gov.cn/
http://validator.w3.org/check/referer
http://www.statcounter.com/
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/check/referer
http://www.phpbb.com/
http://www.yahoo.com/
http://del.icio.us/post
Before I summarize I would like to nip the PageRank discussion in the bud. Google releases its PageRank metric through a browser toolbar. This is not the droid you are looking for. That green bar represents only a very small part of the overall search algorithm.
Just because a page has a PageRank of 5 does not mean it will outrank all pages with a PageRank of 4. Keep in mind that major search engines do not want you to reverse engineer their algorithms. As such, publicly releasing a definitive metric for ranking would be idiotic from a business perspective. If there is one thing that Google is not, it's idiotic.
In my opinion, hyperlinks are the most important factor when it comes to ranking web pages. This is the result of them being difficult to manipulate. Modern search engines look at link profiles from many different perspectives and use those relationships to determine rank. The takeaway for you is that time spent earning links is time well spent. In the same way that a rising tide raises all ships, popular domains raise all pages.Likewise, popular pages raise the given domain metrics.
The Secrets of Relevancy
In the previous section, I discussed how popular pages (as judged by links) rank higher. By this logic, you might expect that the Internet's most popular pages would rank for everything. To a certain extent they do (think Wikipedia!), but the reason they don't dominate the rankings for every search result page is that search engines put a lot of emphasis on determining relevancy.
Text Is the Currency of the Internet
Relevancy is the measurement of the theoretical distance between two corresponding items with regards to relationship. Luckily for Google and Microsoft, modern-day computers are quite good at calculating this measurement for text. By my estimations, Google owns and operates well over a million servers. The electricity to power these servers is likely one of Google's larger operating expenses. This energy limitation has helped shape modern search engines by putting text analysis at the forefront of search. Quite simply, it takes less computing power and is much simpler programmatically to determine relevancy between a text query and a text document than it is between a text query and an image or video file. This is the reason why text results are so much more prominent in search results than videos and images.
As of this writing, the most recent time that Google publicly released the size of its indices was in 2006. At that time it released the numbers shown in.
Size of Google Indices
Data Size in Terabytes
Crawl Index 800
Google Analytics 200
Google Base 2
Google Earth 70
Orkut 9
Personalized Search 4
So what does this emphasis on textual content mean for SEOs? To me, it indicates that my time is better spent optimizing text than images or videos. This strategy will likely have to change in the future as computers get more powerful and energy efficient, but for right now text should be every SEO's primary focus.
But Why Content?
The most basic structure a functional website could take would be a blank page with a URL. For example purposes, pretend your blank page is on the fake domain [www.WhatIsJessicaSimpsonThinking.com]. (Get it? It is a blank page.) Unfortunately for the search engines, clues like top-level domains (.com, .org, and so on), domain owners (WHOIS records), code validation, and copyright dates are poor signals for determining relevancy.
This means your page with the dumb domain name needs some content before it is able to rank in search engines. The search engines must use their analysis of content as their primary indication of relevancy for determining rankings for a given search query. For SEOs, this means the content on a given page is essential for manipulating—that is, earning—rankings. In the old days of AltaVista and other search engines, SEOs would just need to write "Jessica Simpson" hundreds times on the site to make it rank #1 for that query. What could be more relevant for the query "Jessica Simpson" than a page that says Jessica Simpson 100 times? (Clever SEOs will realize the answer is a page that says "Jessica Simpson" 101 times.) This metric, called [keyword density], was quickly manipulated, and the search engines of the time diluted the power of this metric on rankings until it became almost useless. Similar dilution has happened to the keywords meta tag, some kinds of internal links, and H1 tags.
But how does this apply to modern search engines?
The funny thing is that modern-day search engines still work essentially the same way they did back in the time of keyword density. The big difference is that they are now much more sophisticated. Instead of simply counting the number of times a word or phrase is on a webpage, they use natural language processing algorithms and other signals on a page to determine relevancy. For example, it is now fairly trivial for search engines to determine that a piece of content is about Jessica Simpson if it mentions related phrases like "Nick Lachey" (her exhusband), "Ashlee Simpson" (her sister), and "Chicken of the Sea" (she is infamous for thinking the tuna brand "Chicken of the Sea" was made from chicken). The engines can do this for a multitude of languages and with astonishing accuracy. Don't believe me? Try going to Google right now and searching related:www.jessicasimpson.com. If your results are like mine, you will see websites about her movies, songs, and sister. Computers are amazing things.
In addition to the words on a page, search engines use signals like image meta information (alt attribute), link profile and site architecture, and information hierarchy to determine how relevant a given page that mentions "Jessica" is to a search query for "The Simpsons."
Summary
In this Post, I explained the concepts of popularity and relevancy in relation to modern search engines. This information, along with your prior SEO experience, will make up the foundation for all of the SEO secrets.
About the Author
In this Post, I explained the concepts of popularity and relevancy in relation to modern search engines. This information, along with your prior SEO experience, will make up the foundation for all of the SEO secrets.
Whois Microsoft.com
