You may on occasion need to track down an employer or individual online, either to get their contact details or to find out more about them. As Google| is the most popular search engine the tips below are written mainly with their site in mind.
See how many and what type of results you get by entering the person’s name into Google. If the name is unusual you might be lucky and find them straight away, but in many cases you will either have too many results to look through, or get no relevant results. In the first case you need to narrow down your results, if the second you need to broaden it.
Narrowing your search
You can improve your chances of finding someone online by enclosing their name in inverted commas, e.g. “robert connolly”. There are likely to be hundreds of people with that name online, so think what other information might be helpful, such as their location, job title and employer, for example:
“robert connolly” “hr manager” BBC salford
Alternatively you can use Google to search an employer’s website for a word or phrase by preceding your search terms with 'site:' followed by the website’s url, for example:
site:www.bbc.co.uk “robert connolly”
If the vast majority of your results appear to be related to someone else with the same name you can eliminate these results by using the NOT command. See our advice for searching online| for more advanced search tips. For example if you found that there was someone named Robert Connolly who worked at PricewaterhouseCoopers you could enter the following search terms:
“robert connolly” NOT pricewaterhousecoopers
Broadening your search
If your initial Google search produced few results, you can broaden your search by thinking about the ways the name might appear on a webpage. For example, on some sites he might go by an initial (“r connolly”), or the order of his names may be reversed (“connolly robert”). Perhaps he has a middle initial, in which case you could try searching for “robert * connolly,” with the 'wildcard' asterisk standing in for the missing unknown letter. You could also try different spelling and nickname variants of his two names e.g. “robert connelly,” “rob connolly.” To save time you could check all these terms in one search through the use of the word OR:
“robert connolly” OR “connolly robert” OR “r connolly” OR “robert * connolly” OR “robert connelly” OR “rob connolly”
Please note: Google is not case sensitive, but when using NOT or OR these terms must always be capitalised.
Image searches
If you have met the person you are looking for but are not completely sure about their name, you can try using some of the searches tips suggested above in Google Images| to see if their photograph turns up. A useful feature of Google images is that you can drag and drop an image into the search box and Google will search and see where else on the web the same image appears.