Search Engines Will Leave You "Searching"
By Dalia Salazar - President, LatinClips. Inc

The scenario: You’re under pressure to lead a meeting and are presenting new strategies, but you require some more supporting data, or you need to find out quickly what’s being said online about your organization or competitor? All you have to do is go to your favorite search engine, plug in your search terms and presto… there’s all your data. Fast and easy, there it is right? Not really.

More and more Latinos are turning to the web for information. The importance of this should not be underestimated; the 2000 Census indicated that there are 35 million Hispanics in the United States. The growth marks a 58% increase from 1990. Also, Hispanics are the fastest growing ethnic group online, according to Nielsen/Net Ratings. In 2002,7.6 million Hispanics surfed the web regularly. Of further interest is the fact that not only are Latinos turning to the web, but also Hispanic media are continuously expanding their online presence. A recent survey conducted November 2001 by Hispanic PR Wire&emdash;the leading niche distribution service in the U.S&emdash;and LatinClips, reveals that 75% of Hispanic print media outlets say they currently post their news content online, and 97% said that the amount of news they post has increased in the past year.

This onslaught of availability of information online has created a research conundrum for people trying to find recent and reliable information on the Web. It is a myth that public search engines are comprehensive. When you enter search terms in the search box and receive results, you may think that it has searched the entire web, but in reality the system has only searched the index of that particular search engine. The process in which search engines gather their information is through special programs, or robots, usually nicknamed “web crawlers” or“spiders.” Once “crawlers” have retrieved the requested data, they hand it off to the search engine’s indexers (another program), and then the content is logged depending on th e particularities of the search engine.

Public search engines scour approximately 20-50 percent of the web, and competing search engines can oftentimes vary about 50% in the number of citations. Search engines cannot provide an archive of documents that once existed on the Web, but have since been removed&emdash;such as press releases or news articles. Moreover, search engines visit news sites once every 4 to 8 weeks, and newspapers normally remove news stories after a few days. This little known fact about search engines can pose a problem for companies and PR firms because, attempting to find news stories or press releases this way, is ineffective.

First of all, public “crawlers” simply can’t find all the pages on the Web, either because there are poor (or no) links to key news sites, or the “crawlers” just do not accthe content. Secondly, the Web is constantly growing or being updated, and it is difficult for web “crawlers” to keeup. Thirdly, all search engines are subject to individucharacteristics and rules for indexing proprietary web ess p al pages. At times, webmasters force search engines to follow a certain protocol and wait to find content on their sites. This alleviates the waiting time for individual visitors to a site as it speeds up how the site loads up. Additionally, some types of content pose technical problems for web “crawlers,” such as special frames or codes. Some webmasters inadvertently drop or move pages around, and sometimes, even deliberately, they create exclusion codes that prevent “crawlers” from accessing their pages.

In sum, particularly for public relations and marketing practitioners, manual news monitoring or content searching using public search engines is inefficient at best. Companies may be missing critical news about themselves or their competition. One could even suffer the repercussions of negative or false information being said about your organization and distributed on web sites, newsgroups and forums. It is important for Latinos, and those marketing to them, to know where and how to obtain critical information online. Not only are we now the largest minority in the U.S.&emdash;we should strive to be the best informed.

The best method for obtaining all or most of an organization’s relevant online information is to subscribe to a clipping service. The proprietary, expertly programmed web “crawlers,” visit relevant sites, sometimes up to seven times a day.

Dalia Salazar directly oversees all of the technology aspects of the service and is responsible for all monitoring and developing of resources in the research department’s databases. LatinClips is an online clipping service specializing in U.S. Hispanic and Latin Americanmedia. For more information please call LatinClips at 1.866.LAT.CLIP,(305) 971-8687, or visit our website at www.latinclips.com.