Managing Information with Google for Work

Using Google’s Search for Work helps you and your customers find information when it’s needed — without the hassle of using advanced search techniques.

If you think about it, a huge part of our working day comes down to managing information. Whether we’re getting the word out via our websites, blogs, or social media accounts; making a sales call; or handling a customer service inquiry, it all comes down to processing information. Add in the time we spend looking up retailers, suppliers, and vendors, and you can see why managing how we search for facts is huge.

If you’ve been paying attention to our blog — and we really hope you have! — then you’ll know that this is the second part of a series we’re doing on solving issues using Google for Work. Today, we’re going to look at another service Google for Work provides: managing information with Google Search.

Using Google Search In Your Business

Google Search for Work actually comes in two flavors — an appliance, which is for your own company's network, and a search box on your website.  

First, let's focus on the Google Search Appliance (GSA). This version of Search basically brings the power of Google's search engines into your network. And your employees don't have to be search engine wizards to get the most out of it, either: It supports queries with wildcards (such as *.docx for any filename with a .docx extension), and it even provides spellcheck and synonyms when you're stuck. There's a veritable laundry list of benefits to GSA.

Let's get down to results:

• Less time spent searching.
• More time spent productively working.
• Less frustration trying to get the search engine to spit out relevant results.
• Better (and actually, customizable) search results from information within your own company.

Using Google Search to Help Your Customers

Now, let's look at things from the perspective of one of your customers. Is information on your website easy to find? If you're running a site with even a moderate amount of complexity, it may not be as easy as you think to find specific information. Why not? Well, not all of us organize information in the same way. While it may make sense to your web designer to put product information on one page, your customers may not realize it's there.

In theory, your customers could use the Google webpage to search your site; or, you could just put a Google search box in your site and make everyone's life easier. For small businesses, this could run for as little as $250 a year. (In other words, considerably less than my personal coffee budget.) And it's very flexible, giving you the power to better organize your website and control exactly how search results appear.

This is just a very general overview of Search for Work. You can find more specific examples here. And we’re not done with Google products just yet. Be sure to check out the next post on Techsperts Talks, when we’ll talk about how you can use Google Apps to manage productivity at work (and not necessarily just at the office).

Featured image credit: Creative Commons