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5 more tips for making the most of Google (tips 11-15)

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How can you quickly determine someone’s corporate e-mail address when all you have is the individual’s name and company website? What technique lets you limit the search of a term or phrase to a specific website? Can one find documents online by entering a file type extension into a Google search?

Answers to these questions were forthcoming at the closing main platform session of the Million Dollar Round Table’s 2014 annual meeting, held in Toronto on June 11. During a 30-minute talk, sales consultant Sam Richter reviewed for attendees — top-producing life insurance sales professionals from across the globe — helpful tips to more effectively search for information about prospective clients. The following is a recap on five of the search techniques.

See also:

10 tips for making the most of Google

What to do

If you can’t remember part of your search, use an asterisk (*) and Google will fill in the blanks. This feature is great for name searches, job titles and more.

Example

“Anderson * Associates” delivers results with the first word being Anderson, the last word being Associates, and Google will fill in words in the middle. “Vice President of * at 3m” delivers web pages where that job title exists.

What to do

Most e-mail addresses have the same back end as their company website addresses. So if you don’t have someone’s e-mail address, enter * then @ followed by the website address and put the entire search within quotes (e.g., “*@acme.com”).

Determine the naming connection (e.g., first initial, last name, website address) and you can usually figure out anyone’s email at the company. Verify e-mail addresses at http://verify-e-mail.org.

Example

*@acmecorp.com delivers e-mail addresses for people who work at Acme Corporation. You may not find the e-mail address of the person you want. But you’ll usually find the naming convention respecting how the company does their e-mail addresses. Remember to only use this technique if you have a relationship with the person whose e-mail address you’re trying to find.

What to do

Use Site: and limit your search to a specific site. This technique is great for quickly finding information on a specific company.

Example

“retirement benefits” site:generalmills.com will search for the phrase, “retirement benefits” limit but will limit the search to only the General Mills website.

What to do

Find files that are posted online using a Filetype: (filetype colon) search, followed by the specific file type extension.

Popular extensions include:

doc (Word document)

xls (Excel spreadsheet)

ppt (PowerPoint document

pdf (Adobe PDF file)

Remember that Office 2007 adds an “x” after each file extension (e.g., pptx).

Example

“Lawson software” filetype:xls (or filetype:xlsx) will find Excel documents residing in cyberspace that contain the phrase Lawson Software. Documents you might find online using different extensions could include sales presentations, annual reports, company lists, research papers, RFP responses, budgets, forecasts, membership lists and more.

What to do

Choose Maps link, enter a business type or company name. Click the Satellite tab. Click, hold and drag the “person icon” to the map for a street view (if available).

Example

Enter “advertising agency”+ Tel Aviv, Israel in the search field to see a map of Tel Aviv showing ad agency locations. Choose and click a location for details about that firm.

 


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