- [Nicole] Hello, so now we're gonna be looking at how to use search engines effectively. These are one of the most useful tools that we have these days. So I know I've just talked about the problems with Google and corporate search engines. However, yeah, they are obviously incredibly useful for research. I think when I'm using Google, it doesn't really work that well on Tor. So I like to use my VPN and then go into private browsing with Firefox. Okay so I'm gonna whiz through these and then I'm gonna show you on a browser what they mean. 

So you can search for a whole phrase using quotation marks, these little things. You can search for two things, like kind of in the context of each other. So you could search G4S and prisons, or G4S and detention or G4S and cleaning, or their different industries. Can also exclude something in your search using this little minus sign. So for example, Royal Bank of Scotland. Lots of content comes up about Grainger but if you want to exclude that, you can use this little minus sign. That means you'll get other kind of Royal Bank of Scotland content. You can also search within a specific website. So this is really useful if a website doesn't have its own search function and also the Google robots, they kind of organize information a bit differently. So it's like a really good way of kind of searching a site. So if we wanted to look at the Corporate Watch site and find G4S related posts or content, we would use site and then this and then the website. And then you can also search by country. So I could go to google.fr for France and I would be using like a French search engine. And I've put a little hyperlink here to a list of all the different country codes and that way, if you wanted to Google something in Australia or Switzerland or whatever, you can get more relevant local content, which is a really effective tool if we're doing international research. 

So yeah, you can also search by different kinds of file. This is like a hundred percent. If you take anything away from this lesson, it's these little hacks here because they're so useful. So you can look for PDF documents or just kind of normal documents and also PowerPoints. So when I was researching prison expansion, I would also look with this term here and I found presentations that people in the Ministry of Justice had given to private companies and we've got lots of information about the prison builds that we couldn't find on other websites and other new sites. So yeah, really, really useful. And then the other thing with Google is you can clarify the timing results, so you can look kind of any time, which will bring up like the most popular posts from 10 years ago or whatever, to now. You could look past hour, the past 24 hours, the past week, past month, the past year, or put in a specific date range. 

So sometimes what I've done is if a particular thing is very overwhelming, for example, I wrote a piece of research about this company called Yara who are a Norwegian fertilizer company and there was so much stuff about them, like so many controversies in so many countries that what I did was I broke my research down into years. So I looked at, you know, 2019, 2018, 2017 and I just kind of like systematically went through the Google results like that way And that was a really good way of optimizing the search engine. And then you can also use an advanced search with Google. So I'll show you how to do this in a second but you basically go to tools and then down to advanced search and then yeah, you can use all these different options. So you can add all these words, you can have exact phrases. Again, so these are things that are in quotes. Any of these words, so you might put something like dog or cat, so then you wouldn't get results with both of them at the same time. None of these words, so you can exclude certain things. Searching between different numbers can narrow results by language, by region, by timeframe that you've specified. 

Basically, the advanced tips that I've just showed you, this is a kind of way, if you've forgotten the little names of colon file type or something, you can use their advanced search instead. So you might have things like terms appearing. So this is like anywhere in the page. So yeah, that could be if you're trying to look for something specific, maybe you're looking for an annual accounts file or a company's quote about a specific like controversy or something. Safe search, so that's obviously just kind of like a Google filter about whether you wanna filter out explicit content. File type, which I've mentioned and then usage rights. So that might be, you want to find kind of material that is okay to be copied, or you want to find images that are okay to be used without crediting someone, for example. 

Okay and then before I show you how to use everything, I just wanted to bring up how to search historical websites. So Google will commonly have this like cache, so they'll often store kind of the history of a site. I'm trying to think of an example of when I've used this. I know one time when I was researching prison expansion, there had been an event and it was like a historical event where they were talking about prison construction and they were saying that they didn't have the right file type that I was looking and then I looked in the cache and then I found that they had uploaded a file like a year ago or something that Google had stored but that the website itself hadn't stored or had been removed, maybe intentionally because of the campaign. So, that's a really useful tool. The other very useful tool is called the Wayback Machine. Actually, maybe I'll just click on it so you can see. This is what I mean about my internet where I am. It's very, very slow. Yeah, people don't believe it but with the pandemic, it's even worse 'cause everyone is using it. Okay, so what you can do is you can put in a particular webpage and browse the history. So you can see like what that webpage has looked like over time. So it's really useful if companies are kind of hiding certain things that they've done. So one example that I mentioned here is there was a campaign in Brighton to close down a arms factory called Edo. The campaign was called SmashEDO and in, I think one of their court cases, I mean, there was like several cases over the years, the company had kind of denied selling weapons to be used in Palestine, I think and then the campaigners found on the Wayback Machine like an archive of the company's website, which like explicitly listed them saying that and then that was used in court. I could have got that wrong in terms of like specific details but the basic gist of it was, it was really useful for the campaigners to double-check the company's website and look through that archive as a kind of a mechanism to find stuff that a company's maybe denied doing or has hidden out of view. Okay, so we're gonna look at some of these examples and how to do them. 

So I'm just in Firefox and on Google. So I've put here G4S and prisons. I don't know if everyone knows G4S. They're quite a famous international company that will come up in our company profile section but here you can see it's brought us like more direct results. So their custodial and detention services, this is like their explicit kind of prison arm of the things that they do. We've got an article here about how they've managed prisons, contracts they've got. So yeah, so G4S itself, if we google G4S, we might find a huge amount of content but by putting in that and and putting in what we're specifically looking at, we've got more relevant information coming up there. Yeah. So this was Richard's example. So if we looked at Royal Bank of Scotland and Grainger, then we'd get like all sorts of stuff that would include about Grainger but if you put the minus sign in, then we get lots of hits about Royal Bank of Scotland that doesn't include that. So, it's a good way of kind of filtering through the fluff. Okay, I'll just close these and then yeah, the site tool. So this is looking at where G4S has been mentioned on corporatewatch.org. So there's a couple of hits here, like a company profile, an article about one of their detention center contracts. Yeah, so all the different places on our website where G4S had been mentioned. Okay, so now we're looking for G4S and then the file type PDF. So they've got here, I've got a brochure. So you can see when it says PDF 'cause it's got a little PDF here on the side there. So yeah, you can again, see, look cached. This would be saved in there by the Google robots. So we've got a secure solutions brochure. We've got an events brochure we've got a G4S Gurkha Services. G4S Canine Security Services, investor presentation. We're gonna be talking about these a lot more in the next module but as you can see, it's like really useful documents there. And again, you can add more things, right? 

To make it more specific. So I could put G4S and prisons file type PDF. So yes, something about trans prisoners, prisoner custody, HMP Parc, it's a private prison in South Wales that G4S run. So yeah, it's very useful. Similarly, file type doc here. So we've got other documents. I do find that PDFs are maybe a bit better for certain things but docs are useful for other things, especially things like letters. I've got some agenda of, again, this is where you can see the campaign. People being able to find information about us easily as well. This is from a campaign website. Yeah, stuff from Manchester City Council. So yeah, again, it's a lot easier if you put in something specific. So we've put G4S and prisons. So then look, yeah. Interesting stuff about procurement, prison reform trust documents, you get the picture. And finally, here is PowerPoint document. So we've got something about G4S and Turkey, so that might come back to that. That could be very interesting. PowerPoint presentations are really useful because they're really designed for like a very specific audience. So when you have something like an investor presentation, they're really kind of giving you the full facts and yeah, they're not quite as bulky either as long reports or long annual reports, they're often quite good at communicating information quickly. Okay, so those are just a few little Google tools that you can use. There's many, many more Google shortcuts but these are kind of the main ones we use with Corporate Watch.