Sourcing and Research

Site:Search is a fast and efficient way to search Plaxo, Jigsaw, MySpace—and other social and business networking sites - because you can sidestep many of the rules and restrictions within these sites by tapping into the Public Profile. You will need to be a member of each network you are attempting to search.

The checklist below is simple. I am often asked to troubleshoot search strings that aren’t doing what they are supposed to do.

I can’t give an exact percentage but it is safe to say that the vast majority of the strings would work fine but have errors that are easily overlooked.

There are many sites online dedicated to finding phone numbers and email addresses. Click the following link for a variety of the most popular available, and most are free. Finding Contact Information .

Twitter Search www.search.twitter.com 

Twitter search is fairly straightforward. Because it is real time Boolean Searching String capable however, don't expect to get number of results since that's fairly pointless in this situation. Just expect to get results from the last few seconds back, and you get the full tweet.

LinkedIn Name Finder is a fantastic shortcut.

Using Google, we can find most of these hidden names in your LinkedIn Advanced Search results by performing a simple copy and paste. This procedure taps into the contacts’ public profile, which includes the name, since most contacts do include their names in these public profiles.

All the major search engines offer us an array of advanced features we can use under certain circumstances to zero in on the type of data we are seeking. One lesser known and surely under utilized technique that Google offers us is the ability to do a number range search. They call it numrange. Unfortunately this only works in Google and not Live or Yahoo at this time.