OUR METHOD

Building a blog from scratch on a subject that was at first far from being our field of knowledge is not an easy thing.

At first, we basically depended on Google to find the information. We could find some interesting sources, and it was a good start for us. But we needed to pick the best sites out of the many we got that were only advertising for this or that phone company. And yet, it was not enough, and we decided to try other web resources. The problem was : which one should be privileged, as there are so many of them ? Another difficulty came from the fact many potentially really interesting documents required to pay to be granted the access to them, and the amount requested was sometimes astonishing.

Fortunately, we were given a full training by Mr. Jean-Paul Pinte, expert on competitive intelligence. He gave us a selection of some of the web best tools to find the right information for free, and without having to click hundreds of times on "next page" on search engines like Google. But even in this selection, some tools were not adapted to our research.
Then we tried Soople which is great to find interesting files like ".pdf" which can detain precious information. We also rely a lot on GoogleAlert, which can give you the latest files on a subject, provided you enter the right keywords, which is not obvious by the way, and you may need to change them to optimize your research. This is not a free service, and we were bounded to the free limited version, which was enough for a good start to our minds.

Then we downloaded software specialized in meta searching. For example, StrategicFinder. But the free version is very limited and the results we got were not relevant at all, even worse that any classic Google search, we could almost only find commercial links. We experimented the same kind of problems with CopernicAgent which was a bit more decent, but so limited in its basic free edition. We decided not to use them any more.

We were told about websites aspirators, which can save all the pages of a website and enable you to browse them offline, which can be interesting if you don't have internet access at home. We chose to use PageSucker, a convenient shareware aspirator. This feature was useful for Frederic at first, but he finally got broadband at home and so every team member was connected at home since . Aspirators can also warn you of any change on a website so you can be aware of it in no time (but then you'll need to be connected). Although this kind of software can seem useful, we don't use them a lot, since we do not browse much websites with constant updates. We rather need synthesis files.
We also use search engines like KartOO and Vivisimo. These search engines are more recent and are largely underused. You should really consider them even for your usual researches. They have this innovative way of displaying the results of your search, graphical for KartOO, classified by themes for Vivisimo, and the results are even more accurate than on a usual search engine. WebBrain works on the same basis, still we did not find it as pertinent in its results, and a little longer to load too.
If you want to get more information about search engines, visit Abondance.com, they deal about the innovations in this field (in French).

Comments

[Coach Purses]

Everyone have their different advantages, so that we use to communicate with a mentality of appreciation, it will eliminate the old prejudices and knot, and thus gain a sincere friendship and trust.