Job Hunt 2.0: I Heart Site Colon (aka Site:)

Here’s another really useful trick that I use all the time to find information quickly without having to scroll through never-ending Google results.  If you’re looking for information on one specific site, try a trick called x-raying. For example, let’s say you want to look up the Silver Anvil winners from 2005 on the PRSA site, but you don’t want to go through pages of info to find the results.  You can “x-ray” the PRSA site by using “site:” and you can target the specific information that you’re looking for much more quickly.  So basically it’s like you’re Googling just one web site instead of the entire web.  Here’s how it works:

-Go to www.google.com

-Enter in “site:” plus the web site and simple keywords.

site:prsa.org “silver anvil” 2005

-The 2005 Silver Anvil winners are the fourth down on the list.  Click here to see the results.

Now, let’s say that you want to look up which PR firm worked on the winning campaign for Rawlings this year.  Here’s what your search would look like this time:

site:prsa.org “silver anvil” rawlings

-Your answer is right at the top of the list.  F-H worked on the winning “The Summer of Glove” campaign this year.  Click here to see the results.

You can use this little trick to find contact information on company sites – particularly media relations and investor relations – and it’s obviously very useful when a company web site doesn’t have a search field included directly on their site.

I also think it’s really fun to x-ray sites like LinkedIn, Flickr, and MySpace – I personally think the search tools on MySpace are terrible so this is a good way to work around their lackluster system.  I’m addicted to celebrity gossip (shhhh) so I also use this trick to pinpoint information about specific celebs on tmz.com and perezhilton.com.  You can use this tool in a variety of ways, but I think the value add is the amount of time you’ll save scrolling through pages of search results – site: will take you directly where you want to go!