How to Find Out Anything: From Extreme Google Searches to Scouring Government Documents, a Guide to Uncovering Anything About Everyone and Everything
Don MacLeod
Language: English
Pages: 162
ISBN: 2:00326237
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In How to Find Out Anything, master researcher Don MacLeod explains how to find what you're looking for quickly, efficiently, and accurately—and how to avoid the most common mistakes of the Google Age.
Not your average research book, How to Find Out Anything shows you how to unveil nearly anything about anyone. From top CEO’s salaries to police records, you’ll learn little-known tricks for discovering the exact information you’re looking for. You’ll learn:
•How to really tap the power of Google, and why Google is the best place to start a search, but never the best place to finish it.
•The scoop on vast, yet little-known online resources that search engines cannot scour, such as refdesk.com, ipl.org, the University of Michigan Documents Center, and Project Gutenberg, among many others.
•How to access free government resources (and put your tax dollars to good use).
•How to find experts and other people with special knowledge.
•How to dig up seemingly confidential information on people and businesses, from public and private companies to non-profits and international companies.
Whether researching for a term paper or digging up dirt on an ex, the advice in this book arms you with the sleuthing skills to tackle any mystery.
Keyword location allows you to find sites where your search term appears on a page title, in a URL, in the text of the page, or in links to the page from other sites. This feature helped a trademark researcher I know who was trying to find websites that were selling unlicensed merchandise that infringed on a client’s trademarks. To find sites that have used a trademark without permission in their URLs, conduct a Google search with the command inurl:. If the trademark were XYZ, then you would
sources. The town library of Ballplay, Alabama, catalogs its books exactly the same way as does the Library of Congress. The process is less quaint than the old days, and it’s plenty faster and more accurate to boot. I introduce the MARC system as a way to show you how to mine the details of a book’s record to help you better find your way through a library catalog. Locate an item of interest—the kind of title that makes you say, “Oh, yeah, that’s exactly what I am looking for”—and the
professionals. A number of resources can offer the fruits of their own research (for a fee). Dun & Bradstreet and Hoovers are the two commercial publishers that provide information on privately held companies. Both of them sell their information to subscribers. For business researchers, Hoovers offers two plans: a subscription for researchers who do large-volume research and an on-demand type of account for the occasional researcher. Contact the companies for details on their prices. However, any
maintained by government agencies, you’ll do well to remember where they are produced. So hark back to eighth-grade social studies and those memories of the three branches of government: the executive, the legislative, and the judicial. In the United States, both the federal government and the fifty state governments follow the same three-branch structure. The executive branch agencies are where the vast majority of the records you’ll be interested in come from, because they enforce the laws the
130 unique, 129 Nanotechnology, 3 NASA, 19 NASCAR, 110–11 National Archives and Records Administration, 156–57 National Association of Biology Teachers (NABT), 113 National Association of Counties, 114–15 National Association of Insurance Commissioners, 184, 218 National Baseball Hall of Fame, 82–83 National Cell Phone Registry, 133–34 National Crime Information Center, 127–28 National Flag Foundation, 110–11 National Information Center, 184 National Institutes of Health, 24