Today we are going to talk search engines. In my previous blogs I have provided you with the tools to build effective Boolean search strings. However, the successes of our searches are largely determined by which search engine we use.

In order to determine what search engine to use we have to ask ourselves two important questions:

1. What search engines in Canada have the highest search volume?*

*Results as of November 12^th, 2011 according to www.hitwise.com

If the majority of our competitors are conducting their searches on Google.ca – why wouldn’t we try our searches on Bing, Ask or Yahoo? Google’s search engine only covers 40% of the content on the internet, with the other 60% being swept up by alternative search engines.

2. What search engines in Canada have the most visitors?*

*Results as of November 12^th, 2011 according to www.hitwise.com

Our competitors may not even know about alternative search engines because they aren’t even frequently visiting Bing, Ask or Yahoo.

Why are we so attracted to Google?

Google is easy to use. It is creative and visually stimulating. We like Google AdWords. It is what we know. But like every search engine it has its limitations. So how do we determine what search engine is best? Well it depends on our search string.

I have provided you with a list of Search Engine Limitations and Commands to help you determine which search engine to use and how to create an effective search string for each engine.

Try out a couple of your search strings on all four search engines and let me know which ones were most successful.

Join us next week, when I introduce you to some very exciting metasearch engines.