The Power Of The Press Belongs To The people

Each day people realize they can add their own unique view of to the world by publishing information online. Many of these authors find their way to content sites like Associated Content, Ezine Articles, and Squidoo. Once there, they publish articles, audio, and video information. They add thousands of new content pages to these sites daily.

Even more people add content to their own blogs on sites like Blogger and WordPress. Some even add content to blogs hosted on their own domains. Aggregators like Technorati, Topix and Google Blogsearch pick up the combined weight of these blog posts and present them in indexed directories. Together these bloggers and aggregators form an informal syndication network publishing the collective thoughts of the world.

This is an amazing historical period for personal publishing. Easy, inexpensive access to the Internet gives anyone who desires it the means to publish their own works. The full power of the press belongs to everyone, not just to those who can afford a press.

Open Publication Produces High Noise Debts

This creates an overwhelming amount of content available on nearly any topic imaginable. That can become a problem when you are researching information. It is not the only problem open publishing causes for researchers.

A lack of editorial filtering produces an atmosphere that allows publishing of everything regardless of merit. A lot of noise makes it into the mix with the real content. For each valuable article published, much more junk also joins the ever-growing information stack. Identifying good content burried under all of the noise can be difficult at times.

This noise debt further compounds the problem of identifying quality content. Automated efforts to qualify content are problematic and the results are often less than optimal. Algorithms go only so far in filtering quality. This is clear when searchers find parked domains at the top of search pages for some search terms.

Search Solves Some Of The Problem

Nearly all content sites have search features. Most of them offer some limited level of advanced search options. Ultimately they are content publishers, not search engines. They simply can’t devote the resources to search that the dedicated search engines can.

So searching content falls back to the search engines. The search engines often magnify the content volume, and with it the volume of noise accompanying it. They strive to filter for quality, but there is more information than they can handle.

Useful searches require creative searching methods to separate the good content from the noise in as short a time as possible. Often searching for indicators of quality offer better results.

Fortunately Google provides many powerful search operators, allowing us to craft precise useful queries. Crafting a power search query cuts through the clutter and delivers results pages filled with valuable information. This approach does require a little forethought. First you must find a useful criterion, and then determine the best way to apply Google’s search operators to the data.

Using Content Quality Criteria: Power Searching

Useful criteria for identifying excellent content include the content’s freshness, popularity and engagement.

Fresh content is more likely to be relevant than older content. Limiting the age of a query’s results will return information that applies to current ideas, markets and trends. We can reasonably expect content generated last week to be more relevant today than content created a year ago. Freshness is not a hard criteria though. In some cases older authoritative articles offer more quality than newer articles. This is especially true for topics that receive significant amounts of rehashing.

Popularity is a sign of quality, but factors other than quality can drive popularity. Automated tools can simulate popularity indicators. False popularity occurs frequently and can invalidate query results.

Engagement is another sign of quality. Engagement is more difficult to simulate than popularity. This makes it a more robust quality filter. Some content sites don’t encourage interactive use as much as others. For instance, the highest comment count on any Ezinearticles.com article now is 32 and fewer than a dozen have 20 comments. Gauging engagement on these sites.

Power Search Operators Make It Possible

Google provides powerful search operators. Advanced queries to find content based on these three criteria are possible using these operators. Power search operators aren’t well-known. Most searches have never heard of them, much less used them.

You can use these operators to drill to the heart of a research topic very quickly. They allow you to search for both your research topic, and for quality indicators at once. Filtering out less desirable content with quality indicators yields more good content to consider.

The two most useful power search operators Google makes available are the number range operator and the wild card word operator.

The number range operator is two dots combined with one or two numbers defining the range. You can use the number range operator to look for several signs of quality, such as the number of comments, page views, diggs, or votes on an article.

• 5..10 yields a result for any page containing any number between 5 and 10, inclusively.
• ..25 yields a result for any page containing any number lower than 26.
• 1001.. yields a result for any page containing a number larger than 1,000.

The wild card operator uses an asterisk to serve as a symbol for a matching pattern. You can use this operator to search for a range of dates, a common sentence with a single word that changes often or pages that contain any of a specific set of attributes.

• “submitted on *, * 2009” would match a page with any day and month in the year 2009, preceded by the words, submitted on.
• “submitted on *, June 2009” would match a page with any day in June, in the year 2009, preceded by the words, submitted on.
• “the * ways” would match any word preceded by the and followed by way, such as ‘the best ways’ or ‘the top ways’

These operators can also be strung together in a single search query. You can for instance, use the number range operator to find pages with a number of comments and the wild card operator to specify a date range or a specific group. Combining these and other Google search operators allows you to target your search very precisely for quality articles within the general topic you are researching.

For a list of specific power searches that I have created to aid in topical content research you can visit my Power Search  category.