The eOK .network

If you’re interested in finding out what people are saying online but don’t have the budget for expensive social media monitoring services, here are some tips for doing it the Google way (read free).

Be site specific

User opinions are best found on specific community sites such as TripAdvisor for travel and IMDb for movies. In Singapore, there’s a lot being said about consumer technology on HardwareZone for instance. Here’s an example of searching for opinions on the new Intel Core i7 on HardwareZone to get a feel for what Singaporeans are saying about the new processor:

intel core i7 site:hardwarezone.com.sg

But you’ll notice that not all of the results thrown up are user opinions, some of them are articles, press releases, and professional reviews.

Identify the honeypot

Keeping on the example of HardwareZone, most of the user opinions are found in the Forum and nowhere else. You might notice pages such as:

forums.hardwarezone.com.sg/showthread.php?t=2167944

www.hardwarezone.com.sg/articles/view.php?id=2736&cid=2&pg=2

What you would notice is that these pages contain unique terms in their URLs which we can use to our advantage. Now, we’re only interested in the actual forum posts, not the pages that have the topic listings. For that we can use:

site:forums.hardwarezone.com.sg
(because it’s their forums are on a sub-domain)

inurl:showthread
(which points to actual posts on a thread)

So we end up with a Google search string that looks like:

intel core i7 site:forums.hardwarezone.com.sg inurl:showthread

Clean up user habits

Now you’ve honed in on the honeypot of opinions, but you’ll notice that this community uses the same forum for buying and selling which is not really rich in opinion. So to clean that up you can add:

-wts -wtb -sale

By doing this you’ve eliminated most of the “want to sell”, “want to buy”, and “for sale” posts. So your search string looks like:

intel core i7 site:forums.hardwarezone.com.sg inurl:showthread -wts -wtb -sale

So that’s how you use Google to mine for opinions which would be extremely useful for many product vendors.

Other examples

Here are are some examples of search strings I’ve found most useful:

[keywords] site:twitter.com inurl:status

[keywords] site:answers.yahoo.com inurl:questions

[keywords] site:amazon.com inurl:review

[keywords] site:tripadvisor.com inurl:ShowUserReviews

[keywords] site:epinions.com inurl:reviews -search

[keywords] site:complaints.com -directory

Note: Google and other search engines have a limit of 1,000 results. But then again, that’s already a good sample of opinions.