Wasting Time is NOT Valuable
Finding specifically what you are looking for online can take a long time. If you are a business person, an engineer, physician, lawyer, or any other professional, you MUST use time efficiently to find information.
Use Fast Access to Information
NEVER drive around from shop to shop looking for something until you consult the internet. The time it takes to walk to the car could have found what you are looking for on the internet; Google Maps, or even the phone book.
If you know a store near you has what you are looking for, call and check to see if it is in stock; don’t make a wasted trip (store closed, out of stock, price much higher than online… ).
The same is true when you want to learn some piece of information; or even, insight into areas you didn’t know you needed to learn to reach a goal.
Learning to identify and fill gaps in a system of efforts to achieve a system of results, is what professionals are paid to achieve. Building a house, growing a garden, programming software, repairing a car, running a business… the more successful professionals are able to find ways to identify gaps in their understanding, then efficiently work towards filling those gaps.
Prepare Yourself to Ask Useful Questions
Always do a little research before wasting someone’s time, that they could be using on something more productive. Often by doing the initial research about what is being asked, the answer becomes obvious. If not, the question requires knowing some basic information, relationships, and common jargon (keywords) used so the question can clearly be asked.
One method for a product search is as follows; instead of a product it could have been a business, perspective, relationship, or most anything else.
If you don’t know where to get what you are looking for:
- www.wikipedia.com , www.about.com , youtube.com
- learn a little about what you are looking for; potential alternatives
- the accuracy of these resources are usually flawed, but are still useful
- www.google.com
- use Goggle keyword short-cuts for finding information
- see Google extensive list of provided short-cuts
- www.ebay.com
- most often “new” products for 1/2 the cost as compared to elsewhere
- www.yp.com
- businesses that can help you identify what you are looking for
- www.superpages.com
- electronic phonebook
- maps.google.com
- paperback phonebook
- experts you know that might have an idea (after first trying on your own)
- sales representatives that work with the subject matter
All of these can provide you with good keywords to use in your search. For example, after not being able to find what you are looking for online, while searching online you might learn some “industry keywords” (jargon) to use when talking to an expert you know, so that they can zone-in on what you need faster.
Google Advanced Search Features
For Google, use some of the advanced keyword helpers to focus your search efficiency. The following represents some of the tricks you can use to isolate a search from millions of URL hits, to 10 hits or less:
Example: I don’t know anything about conveyor belts for moving garbage from one location to another. I’m tasked with identifying a conveyor belt type and ultimately purchasing one for less than $1,000.
- What is a conveyor belt, and what types are there?
- www.wikipedia.com
- www.about.com
- Where can I get a conveyor belt for less than $1,000 which includes shipping
- www.google.com
- keyword sequences to focus your search
- multiple individual words used in search
…. conveyor belt- results in millions of hits where every webpage that has conveyor AND belt anywhere in the webpage pops up on the search results (Google only displays about 100 of these millions of results)
- information about news stories, products that use conveyor belts…everything
- will take you a long time to find what you are looking for
- keywords within quotation marks
“conveyor belt”- only web pages that have those exact words put together are in the search results
- keywords separated by the capitalized word OR
“conveyor belt” new OR used- OR only acts on the two adjacent letter combinations
- results in every webpage that has “conveyor belt” AND either has new somewhere in that document or has used somewhere in that document
- results in more companies selling conveyor belts
- keywords preceded by a minus sign
-restaurant- the minus sign indicates to ignore every webpage that has the word restaurant
- use this often, and you can just keep adding words to ignore
- -plastic -“needs work” –rusty
- finding web pages only on a specific website
site:www.someurl.com conveyor- Often times you find a website that has a lot of unrelated information and products, hundreds of pages. So you want to only look at the pages on that website that you have interest.
- results in only web pages on that specific website that have the word conveyor
- ONLY web pages on that website will come up
- Finding internet documents of a specific file type
filetype:pdf “conveyor belt” “user manual”- Often times you will be looking for a specific type of file like PDF files because most
- likely manuals about a specific topic are available and you want to see the information in that format
- ONLY links to pdf files will result in the search
- type delimiters, pdf in the above case, can alternately be doc, exe, xls, ppt…
- Finding prices for a product between two limits
“conveyor belt: $10..$1000- results in only web pages that have a dollar amount listed inclusively between $10 and $1000
- $9 and $1001 would be ignored, while $583.32 would be in your search list
- however, any other product on the same page as conveyor belt that costs $51.32 would also come up
- Using multiple tricks in the same search”new mexico” “conveyor belt” $10..$1000 new OR used -news -travel -amazon -studies
- Concatenation is where you can use more than one keyword tool at the same time for the search
- You can use any combination of the above tools in any order when separated by a space
- This is very powerful. You can reduce the number of results down to just a few very specific web pages very quickly.
- multiple individual words used in search
- keyword sequences to focus your search
- www.google.com
If these don’t work the first time, change your keywords and possibly call an expert to get some suggestions. But always consult the internet first so you can talk intelligently with your expert.
You can find a large variety of other useful search tools at:
http://www.google.com/cse/docs/resultsxml.html
Implementing Professional Acumen
Developing anything requires some skill in Project Management.
Implementing project management depends upon Efficient Learning Skills; that are assisted by Research Tips & Tricks. To be a valuable part of a group to usefully choose information and skills to learn and share with the group requires Professional Acumen. To prevent others who want to abuse group resources for their own agendas, skills related to Recognizing Corruption are required; and subsequently what to do to prevent Sustained Corruption.
Growth of group power and influence requires developing a powerful mutually sustaining group. Where member weaknesses are recognized without condescension (Arrogance) nor self-deceit (lack of Self-Respect) and the group together prevents significant harm to the group; all members have weaknesses. Together the group determines a reasonable set of goals, and each member teaches themselves additional skills to support achieving those goals. Demonstrated success creates a reputation of perceived trust in the group and its members. A bad reputation of an individual affects the reputation of the group. So perceived value of the group depends upon training the individual members.
Other persons or groups with control over under-utilized resources, tend to offer access to those resources where there is trust additional under-utilized resources can be developed more than they currently control. The group must be able to show evidence of being a low-risk significant resource for development.
During development, others outside the group who appear to be worthy of Access to Opportunities to earn respect, are provided an opportunity to teach themselves related to a low-risk low-value project benefiting the group.
Failure does not significantly harm the group; depending on many factors the person may be trained or excluded from the group. Success means providing the person a higher risk but more significant opportunity to develop. The person learns to mitigate higher risks, by sharing risks with others in the group (mentoring). As a result, a long string of successes benefits both the group and each individual.
A person without Professional Acumen, cannot usefully participate in development, so they are either used a placeholders to implement some form of control, or they are taught to “consistently” express Professional Acumen so they can learn to become a useful part of developments.