Search by domain
| How often has an internet search taken you down a blind alley or up a garden path?
Probably too often if your experience mirrors that of the author. But here’s a good tip for when research hits a brick wall: try searching by domain name. For instance, say you wanted to do a bit of homework on a company you might be doing business with. Your usual search engine throws up nothing (or, to be more precise, 1,568,923 results, which is the same thing, really) and you either get 404s by entering the company name and sticking dot com on the end, or a company that makes plastic packaging in the States. What next? Go to a domain name company like Easily and track your prey using the domain name availability search. For example, if the company was Owens&Illinois you would first enter <owensillinois> as the keyword. The results show that most of the owensillinois domain name variants are taken but none of those site are quite what you are looking for. Searching again under owens-illinois is more successful. The Who? link for the dot com version takes us to the relevant domain name entry in the VeriSign Registrar WHOIS database. Sure enough, the registrant is based in Toledo and those contact details look mighty familiar too. Let’s double check by going to the site. Ah yes, Owens-Illinois “Packaging Solutions everywhere, everyday”. Just what we were looking for. |