As explained we are uploading for our readers chapter extracted from an conference of the 2007 Online Show in December. We will present you How to search, identify and evaluate valuable open access industry information ?.

Nowadays, general search engines such as Google or Yahoo! favour, despite them, merchant contents to the detriment of free contents.

Off the shelves reports brochures (such as Datamonitor) manage to get high rankings within search engine results. This is the consequence of their deep knowledge and practice of Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Optimization, and their collaboration with Webmarketing Agencies.

As a consequence, free reports are more and more difficult to identify, because mostly relegated in the deep results pages. And this happens despite the fact that they are many more private reports.

In this newchapter, we propose you a step by step methodology, allowing you to get the best from the search engine, and to identify these free reports.

The 2 most important functions that can help you to easily identify free market reports on the Internet

  1. Limit the search to a domain Possible on Google, Yahoo, Live
  2. Limit the search to major format (Pdf, Doc, Ppt) : Possible on Google, Yahoo, not possible on Live


How to limit a search to a domain ?

On Google

Google offers the possibility to use the Boolean operator “Site:”

If you include site: in your query, Google will restrict the results to those websites in the given domain. For instance, automotive industry site:www.oecd.org will find pages about automotive industry within www.oecd.org. help site:com will find pages about help within .com urls. Note there can be no space between the site: and the domain.

This functionality is also available through Google Advanced Search page , under Advanced Web Search > Domains

On Yahoo!

The usage is definitely the same, but you still can change few options :

  • limit search to specific domain suffix
  • search multiple domain is at the same time (which will make you gain a lot of time)

Here are instruction from Yahoo ! help menu

''The site/domain yahoo! Advanced search option Restrict your search to sites with a specific domain suffix, such as .com, .edu, or .gov. For example, if you'd like to search only web sites of non-commercial organizations, click the radio button and select ".org" from the pull-down menu. To specify more than one domain, or one not listed in the drop-down menu, click the upper radio button and type the domains into the text field, separated by commas. You can also use this field to search within a particular web site, such as yahoo.com.''


You can also directly use the operator “site:” to find all documents within a particular domain and all its subdomains. operator on Yahoo! search box.

On Live

Using advanced search function on Live is more complicated than through its competitors websites. You can create a search query by adding or excluding terms or other parameters that narrow your search. But you have to launch the query first, and then add the criteria clicking on the advanced search link.

''Type the web address in the text box, select an option, and then click Add to search. You can specify any of the following: * Websites such as Microsoft.com * Root domains such as .edu, .gov, .com, .net, or .org * Country or region-specific domains such as .ca, .co, .uk, or .de''



How to limit a search to some specific document format ?

Limiting the document format have two advantages :

  • limiting the number of results you have to evaluate
  • most of the market research reports published on the Internet have been converted into pdf format, as a universal format

On Google

The operator “filetype:” followed by pdf, ppt or doc (for respectively pdf, power point presentation and word document) will allow you to specify the file format you would like in your results.

This function is also available on the advanced search box, through the option “File format”

On Yahoo!

You can choose to restrict your search by a specific file type, other than the default settings (all file-types). Currently supported formats are:

  • .htm, .html—Standard HTML
  • .pdf—Adobe PDF
  • .xls—Microsoft Excel
  • .ppt—Microsoft PowerPoint
  • .doc—Microsoft Word
  • .xml, .rdf, .rss—RSS or XML feeds
  • .txt—Plain Text Format

This option is only possible on Yahoo! Advanced Search box