I spent the Tuesday and Wednesday of this past week at NATPE's LATV Fest, which aimed to offer "Real Tools, Real Access, Real Pitches...for Real Producers." Between the panels, lobby chit-chat and lunchtime networking, there was much spirited debate about making money from online content, current trends in reality and scripted programming, and how to avoid falling on your ass in a pitch meeting.
I spent the majority of my time jumping back and forth between the digital and reality TV tracks, as there are a large number of documentarians who work in the latter to pay the bills. I'll be writing a comprehensive piece about the non-fiction perspective on the event for IDA's August e-zine, but I wanted to immediately post a practical nuts-and-bolts piece about a great session I attended on Wednesday called "Google Power Tools: Become a Power Ninja." I thought I was going to a session on search engine optimization (SEO), where I'd learn some tips and tricks about how to make it easier for people to find my work online. The session turned out to be the exact opposite – it was a tutorial on how to use Google more effectively to find what I might be looking for.
Now, the idea of taking a class on how to use Google seems, well, ridiculous. I've been using Google for years. You type in what you're looking for, get a bunch of links and then click away until you find what you need. But as speaker Dmitry Shapiro, Founder and CEO of Veoh Networks, Inc. pointed out, with the growth of the Internet and the large number of results that queries now return, one can lose hours sifting through to find the most useful, relevant information.
For independent filmmakers, time is money. Documentarians usually don't have large research staffs, yet there's a ton of work to be done online, including researching topics, locating subjects and fact-checking the information in projects. Therefore, I wanted to share some of the tips Shapiro passed along about using Google operators, a.k.a. Google commands, to help make this process more efficient, and therefore more economical.
Some of these tips are quite basic, but I'll start at the beginning and build from there. I'll use a few practical examples to help put the tips in context. If these intrigue you and you want to learn more, you can check out the Weekend University class Shapiro teaches on the subject. Google also has an online cheat sheet with a list of some of the commands. If you have other tips to suggest, we'd love to hear them – please add them in the comments section.
Refining your search
Let's say you're doing a documentary on presidential elections, and you want to find material on Barack Obama. You should use quotes around the whole search term.
Enter: "Barack Obama"
Number of search results: 82,800,000
Now let's say you want to focus just on the presidential candidates, regardless of their running mates. So in the case of the recent election, you want to find all the results for Obama that don't mention Joe Biden. The minus sign will omit things from your search.
Enter: "barack obama"-"joe biden"
Number of search results: 80,300,00
There are a ton of sites out there that mention Obama. If you want more vetted information, perhaps you want to just check official government sites. You can specify the kind of site you're looking for with the site command. This operator will give you government sites and mentions of .gov sites that include Barack Obama (but not Joe Biden).
Enter: "barack obama"-"joe biden" site:gov
Number of search results: 70,300
You can make the type of site you're looking for as specific as you'd like. If you want to limit the search to congressional sites:
Enter: "barack obama"-"joe biden" site:congress.gov
Number of search results: 373
You can also narrow your search by the type of file you're looking for. Google indexes all kinds of documents, not just web pages. For example, you might want to find power point presentations about Obama as part of your research.
Enter: "barack obama" filetype:ppt
Number of search results: 2,670
Relevance
In addition to narrowing your search, you'll save time by making sure the results you get are those that are potentially the most relevant. If someone names a particular URL or document with the search term you're looking for, that's a good indication that it is actually focused on your keyword.
Let's say you're doing a documentary on the Catholic Church's attitude towards homosexuality. If you put "Vatican" in as your keyword, Google returns 70,200,000 results. These range from those more pertinent, such as the official site of the Vatican and the Catholic Encyclopedia's entry for the Vatican, and those that are less so, such as sites selling Vatican souvenirs. To find your keyword in the title:
-Enter: Intitle:Vatican
Number of search results: 943,000
To find your keyword in the URL:
-Enter: inURL:Vatican
Number of search results: 963,000
If you want to search for more than one word contained in a title or URL, you can use the allintitle or allinURL operators. For example:
-Enter: allintitle: Vatican homosexual
Number of search results: 267
-Enter: allinURL: Vatican homosexual
Number of search results: 97
Practical applications
Sometimes when researching, you're not sure what search term will be most effective. If you're doing an environmental film about the state of the oceans, there may be very useful sites out there that reference the sea, marine, atlantic, etc . The tilde ~ operator does a synonym search.
-Enter: ~ocean.
Number of search results: 1,170,000,000
This particular search brought up a variety of helpful sites, along with things like the Atlantic Theater Company and Oceanic Airlines. To narrow your search, you might want to refine your search a bit. The following search will bring up all the sites that contain fish and ocean, or their synonyms.
Enter: ~ocean ~fish
Number of search results: 187,000,000
Quite a few of these are travel services that offer help in arranging fishing trips, information that's not useful for your documentary. By omitting the keyword 'travel', you'll be able to get rid of a number of the sites that are focused on fishing tours.
Enter: ~ocean ~fish -travel
Number of search results: 121,000,000
You might also want to try to eliminate some of the seafood restaurants from the search results.
Enter: ~ocean ~fish -travel -restaurant
Number of search results: 107,000,000
If you're trying to find equipment for sale, you can get quite specific with your search by using a combination of operators. For example, let's say you want to find a Panasonic HVX-200 for sale for between $3000-$4000. You can use [#]…[#] to indicate a range of numbers.
Enter: site:ebay.com Panasonic HVX-200 $3000...$4000
Number of search results: 147
When you get to the marketing stage of your film and need to find all the blogs and sites that have given you fabulous reviews, use the link operator to find the pages that link to your own film site.
Enter: link:www.weliveinpublicthemovie.com
**Additional tip: If you land on a page and the link isn't immediately obvious, as is often the case with blog pages that contain multiple entries, use your browser's "find" function to locate the link.
Other Useful Tools
Shapiro turned us on to a few other useful tools on Google. You can use all of the operators above with these sections of Google as well.
Scholar.google.com has information that is generally more vetted than Joe Blogger's information, such as papers, theses, abstracts and articles from academic publishers, professional societies, universities and other scholarly organizations.
Books.google.com searches over 7 million books. You can put in a word or phrase, and it'll return results for the publications that include it. When you click on the link, the word or phrase will actually be highlighted on the page. It's a useful way to find sources for research, as well as quotes about a subject that you might want to use on cards or in press materials. For example, you might search the following for the above-mentioned doc on the oceans:
Enter: "value of our oceans"
Number of search results: 25
Google Blog Search (blogsearch.google.com) finds blogs that are talking about your film, which can be very helpful when trying to build a grassroots campaign. It's a good way to get a sense of the informal chatter occurring online about your subject or your film.