An interesting mix of sectors were represented at my recent UKeiG workshop “The Changing Landscape of search”. With social media becoming such an important part of search, there was a lot to cover in just one day and still include time for delegates to try out search tools for themselves. At the end of these workshops I ask the group to come up with their own top 10 tips. On this occasion we ended up with 13 and then a few people emailed me some more, thereby doubling the number to 20! The list is a combination of simple tried and tested techniques, new services and tools, and new strategies for dealing with the vast amount of information that is returned by the search engines.

1. Set up your own Google custom search engine (http://www.google.com/cse/) for groups of sites that you regularly search and use. It is quick and easy to do, and you can keep them private or make them public.
2. Docjax (http://www.docjax.com/) for searching Google and Yahoo for file formats ppt, doc, xls, pdf
3. Use Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/) to keep up with what people are saying about your organisation or industry, and to find out what is happening at conferences.
4. Nearby Tweets (http://nearbytweets.com/) for monitoring tweets on a subject and from a geographical location
5. Save tweets and Twitter searches if you are using Twitter for competitive intelligence or reputation monitoring/management.
6. Try out the the Google Wonderwheel to see connections between concepts and to change the direction of your search. Run your search, open up the options in the menu to the left of your search and click on Wonderwheel. This had mixed reviews from the workshop participants and even its fans said that it does not always help with the search. Nevertheless, worth trying if you are stuck in a rut and fed up with seeing the same results again and again.
7. In Google  use the menu options to the left of your search results to help you focus your search and for more relevant results.
8. Separate real time and “traditional” web search. Google, Bing and Yahoo incorporate real time and social media results into the main search results. These results are not comprehensive and give a superficial, biassed view of the topic. Use the specialised real time search tools for searching social media.
9. Slidefinder (http://www.slidefinder.net/) for locating individual presentation slides that contain your search terms. There is an Advanced Search that enables you to search specific areas of a slide, for example title, text, notes. You can also limit your search to a university. There are browsable lists at the bottom of the page but they do not list every institution: there are only 47 for the UK!
10. View the cached page version of a document in your search results to see where and how often your terms occur. Useful for very large documents.
11. Biznar (http://www.biznar.com/). Real time federated search tool covering selected business sites, some of which are not searched by Google et al.
12. Google Timeline to see the distribution of pages and documents over time. Remember, though, that the dates are not always when the content was published. A date or year might just have been mentioned in the text or Google mistakenly interpreted a number as a date.
13. Use  double quotes “” around phrases to find specific names or titles. This one is a golden oldie but one that is often forgotten. Works in nearly every search tool.
14. Try alternative names or change a single term to expand your search results, for example BP oil spill vs. BP oil leak. See what the search engine suggests as you type in your strategy and in Google look at  the Related Searches option in the menu to the left of your search results.
15. Add the year to your strategy when searching for somebody or something from a particular year. A simple, obvious trick but another one that is often forgotten. This will only look for the number in the text and does not run a date search, but it does significantly narrow down your search.
16. Try using non-UK and non-US versions of Google, for example http://www.google.com.ar/ or http://www.google.es/ if the information is likely to be in Spanish.
17. When using Google, click on ‘similar’ to find related information and sites similar in content and type.
18. Bing for images. No need to keep clicking the next page for more images, just keep scrolling down. Some also commented that the quality of the results and the layout are better than Google.
19. For video archives try BBC Motion Gallery – BBC Archive at http://www.bbcmotiongallery.com/gallery/home/archives.do and NewsFilm Online at http://www.nfo.ac.uk/
20. Social Mention (http://www.socialmention.com/). Great for monitoring mentions in the social media about a person, company or topic.

The slides for the day can be found on Slideshare at http://www.slideshare.net/KarenBlakeman/changing-landscape-of-search