All business to business companies know that one thing you’re bound to spend some time on is learning about different companies so you can target them as a potential client. For example, if you’re a carpet cleaning company looking to make a connection with different carpet installation companies you might want to know some of the companies in your area and how to contact them. Generally that meant either spending a lot of time on the internet looking things up, make lots of phone calls, or pounding the pavement – but overall a large time investment. Well, Google has a great product that can do a lot of this work for you – FREE!
Google has made a great product called “Google Squared”. And what this site does is VERY handy. Basically you type in your request, what area you are targeting, and it makes up a list for you. So continuing on in the carpet cleaning example above, they might do a search for “Flooring Companies, Coquitlam, BC”, and what it does is creates a list of companies in Coquitlam, their website, addresses, email addresses, etc, etc and presents it to you in a nice table format. You can then decide if you want different columns or not, add your own columns, and there you go – a customized contact list all ready to go! You can even export the file or export it to your Google Docs (More about Google Docs next post!) It even tells you where it got the information, and if it thinks the information may not be accurate. This search even listed if the company was BBB accredited!
So how does Google do this? It basically is using its own search engine to compile the information for you. From the companies’ websites, to their Google Places page, to any directories they may have signed up with. It searches the web and complies it so that you don’t have to spend hours doing it all by yourself. And who hasn’t made a spreadsheet like this on their own and then realized that when they went to use it they wished they’d added another column of information? This lets you add it in seconds instead of taking hours of work!
Anyhow, a very handy Google tool that’s not very advertised that we thought we’d share with you! If you want more information feel free to contact us or visit their Google Squared site at: http://www.google.com/squared.
EDITOR’S NOTE:
We’ve recently learned that Google is phasing out their “Google Labs” of which Google Squared was part of – so Google Squared has unfortunately been shut down.
As Google says:
“As part of the phasing out Google Labs, Google Squared was shut down on September 5, 2011. Any saved Squares have been deleted.
“We will continue to use Google Squared technology to improve search, as we have already done with question answering and related searches. We hope that you have enjoyed using Google Squared as much as we enjoyed building it.”
So it sounds as though some of the squared technology has been incorporated into their searches, but we’ll see what happens! Another casualty of the ever changing internet!
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