Google Search Engine Research Tool

Google Search Engine Research Tool- Tip 5
By Detective Thomas Shilling

Google has a memory like an elephant. Including cached pages and News Group data. You will be surprised at what you can discover. These procedures will often expose many Internet undesirables or confirm your prior research and provide a level of comfort which is necessary to precede with a given transaction. We assume you have already properly completed Steps 1-4 and your results indicate it's worthwhile to proceeded with this step.

If you plan any of the following:

1. Join and or start an affiliate program.
2. Purchase a site.
3. Purchase Webmaster centric goods and or services.
4. Purchase virtual or dedicated hosting.
5. Seeking advice from others. Paid or free.
6. Hire an employee.
7. Hire an independent contractor.

Start with the domain name

Run several different searches (see below) using the domain name and also carefully examine the Cached pages and the News Group results. Let's start with the Google SE:

1. link:www.free-webmaster-tools.com - This search tells you the number of "Back Links" (sites which link to the domain) for a given site. Sites that claim to have been around for years and or proclaim they receive tons of traffic must have a reasonable number of back links.

2. In the results, right click on the Cached link and you can sometimes view older versions of the site. Does this match what the site claims? You can sometimes determine a previous business or attempts to "manipulate" the truth.

3. allinurl: www.free-webmaster-tools.com site:www.free-webmaster-tools.com - This search will tell you how many pages of a given site Google has listed/indexed. Does this match the age of the site and or traffic claims? Mature sites have hundreds of pages indexed. New sites may have none.

Next, it's time to check News Groups. Google's data is immense and dates back to the birth of the Internet. Click the Groups tab and enter the domain name. Click here to see an example. Right click on the View Thread link.

Search for a company name, screen name, or real name

Run these searches in the SE and the News Groups. For example, the search on "Jeff Mcfadden" produces 910 matches. Some of these are not the Jeff Mcfadden of Gator fame so you will need to right click your way down the list.

Conclusions

Using Google as a research tool will often yield areas of concerns or expose lies, which I like to call red flags. To many red flags and it's time to leave. Consider Google your personal "private eye" and you will substantially improve the results of your decision.