Search
Engines
Whilst you may wish to stick
with favoured suppliers, portals or offline
suppliers for most goods, you can use search engines to locate new goods
and suppliers.
There is a list of the major
search engines here. Of that list
we would recommend using Google, as a simple
and effective tool in most circumstances. It is particulalry effective
in indexing document text, and thus can be used to pick out very precise
terms.
For
the dedicated internet search user, you can get powerful tools to refine
and improve search performance from Copernic
Whichever tool you use, some
simple tips to improve purchasing search:
1) if possible input: model
name, part numbers, trademarks or chemical formulae of items that you
would like to buy, be as specific as you can be
2) seek out and follow detailed
advice provided at each search engine, with regard to methods to refine
search
3) try searching in other
languages, and use language translation features at Google.
Use categorised directories
at Yahoo to search for suppliers in particular
market, industry or country (not so good at locating discrete products).
Use Yell to locate businesses by category and
town in the UK.
When you find a useful site,
you can check it out using the tool from Alexa
and identify other similar sites.
