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How The Heck Do I...
Find the Information I Want |
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The Internet is a wonderful source of information... but finding exactly what you want can take hours. Search Automator Pro is an exceptional time-saver. You can get better results INSTANTLY! Then, after you've spent some time exploring its capabilities, you will be amazed at how much highly targeted information you can find at the speed of light! The examples given below are for writers or internet publishers searching for information, but it's easy to see how these steps apply to a million different topics. It's an incredibly valuable tool for finding homework answers, researching content for e-books, finding the best websites on your topic and more. Get your own copy of Search Automator Pro here # 1 - The Opening Screen of Search Automator Pro:
At first Search Automator Pro can look a bit intimidating... but as you'll see below, it's actually very easy to use. (Yet it has a lot of power packed into it for when you're ready!) These are the main areas of Search Automator Pro, related to the numbers you see above: 1. The Main Search Field (red circle). Here's where you type in your main search term. In this example, we've used 'Romance Writing'. 2. The Related Search Field (green circle). This contains several tools to help you do further searches related to the current one. For example, if you were searching on 'chocolate' you could do a related search on 'chocolate truffles', 'brownies' etc. 3. The Panels to Narrow Your Search (purple circle). You can do lots of different searches using Search Automator Pro: tutorials, websites, articles, ebooks and more. We'll look at that in a moment. 4. The Power Search Bar (blue circle) - very powerful! You can direct your search to dozens of search categories. We'll look at that in a moment, too. 5. The Main Browser Window/Tools (orange circle). Contains the main browser plus related tools. 6. Menu Bar: Right at the top of the interface you'll see Search Automator Pro's menu bar. Easy access to the main functions and the 'help' menu. Now let's see what we can do with all this (or some of it, anyway!) # 2 - Refining Your Search
Let's suppose you are a writer... and you have decided to dabble in writing romance fiction. Where can you find out more about becoming a romance writer? To begin, type 'romance writing' into the search bar in the top left hand corner.
In 26 seconds, Google brings you back records of 16 million entries related to romance writing. Eeeek. Who's got time to browse through 16 million pages? You WILL find plenty of relevant entries near the top of the list. But you can still do better than this. Let's see what Search Automator Pro can do to home in on what we want. We'll go to the PANELS on the left hand side. You will find that they are already focusing on the search for ROMANCE WRITING. They are ready to help you speedily find tutorials, videos, books, tips, articles, newsletters and more on this topic. 3. Search for 'Tutorials' We'll start by clicking on TUTORIALS. In less than half a minute Google finds 864,000 pages related to romance writing tutorials. That's a heck of a lot better than 16 million. Now we're getting somewhere. Notice that when you clicked 'tutorials', the Google toolbar search (No. 3 in the illustration below) automatically added 'tutorials' to your original search term "romance writing".
4. Search for 'Checklists' Now let's try another search term in the panel. Let's see... CHECKLISTS would be a good one. Writers love checklists to help them include everything necessary. What can we find?
Excellent! When we click 'checklist', Google goes out and finds us 366,000 entries related to romance writing checklists. The very first entry is 'story checklist for romance novels'. Goodness knows how long it would have taken you to stumble across that without Search Automator Pro! 5. How About a Search for PDFs? Time to try a new approach. PDFs (downloadable documents that open on any computer, Macs or Windows) can be really useful, because they're easy to keep on your computer as a reference. Maybe there are some PDFs available on romance writing? Let's see... We'll start by clicking the MIDDLE icon under our search term 'romance writing' in the top left hand corner. This changes the FILE TYPE from www pages to PDF documents. And then we'll click on 'Techniques', so we can see what's available in a PDF on romance writing techniques.
Pay Dirt!!! Google finds 130,000 PDFs related to romance writing techniques. The very first one on the list is 'how to prepare a successful HeartQuest proposal'. This sounds like good news for any romance writer. (Apply this to writing westerns or science fiction. Or writing about gardening or skiiing or wine... what a bonanza!) 6. How About... Historical Romance Websites? We'll go back to the Web Pages Icon in the 'File Type' area, but this time we'll look for entries on historical romance. And we'll click on 'websites' in the panel below. This nets us nearly 2 million websites on the topic. But now we know we can click on tutorials, or classes, or techniques, or tips... and narrow our search considerably! 7. A Quick Look at the Power Search Toolbar - the Encyclopedia The Power Search toolbar (No. 4 in our very first illustration) will take you to many more areas to help you in your search. As a quick example, let's click on "Reference Search 2". You'll find links there (working from left to right in the area circled below, starting from the pencil image) to:
8. A Final Example - Power Search Using "Words"... And Going to the Rhyme Zone Let's imagine that you are playing around with writing rhyme. Your subject... romance. Can Search Automator Pro help us there? With ease! Click on the 'Words' icon, and immediately a whole new row opens up below.
We're going to choose the third icon from the left, 'rhyme zone'. That takes us directly to the Lycos Rhyme Zone site... and opens up a whole lot more possibilities for us in the panel zone on the left! Let's take a look...
You will see that the panel at left ("2" allows us to choose rhymes for the word 'romance', or we can look for synonyms, antonyms, related words, similar sounding words... a poet's paradise! In the search box, you can type in any word you want and do the same kind of searches. What you've seen above gives you only a tiny taste of the power of Seach Automator Pro. It really is a tool that should be on every computer! |
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