HOOVERS.COM

[Mac]

I'm trying to find engineers at Champions technologies using HOOVERS website but i keep on geting the main page and no actual data. I'm using the string below.

Anyone with a better string or suggestions on how to get more data?

 

site:hoovers.com “Engineer champions technologies” (TX OR “Texas”) engineer -job

 

Thanks for your help.

[Donna Carr]

try removing the quotes?

[Shane Bowen]

Mac - You'll not be able to successfully x-ray Hoovers as their database is proprietary. You'll need to be a paid subscriber (not sure free trial is of much use) to gain access. They have incorporated Boolean into their search function for obvious purposes.

Best,

Shane

[Kandula Santosh Kumar]

Hi Mac,

As Shane said we can't X-ray Hoovers as their database is proprietary.  You can use free trial to get the results.

If you are looking for engineers at Champion Technologies you can find in Jigsaw.....

Try this once

site:jigsaw.com Engineer * champions technologies (TX|Texas)

Thanks

Kandula Santosh Kumar

[Mac]

Kandula,

 

I have used jigsaw and spoke just wanted to find out if we can do the same on Hoovers.

 

Thanks

[Mac]

Thanks

Shane Bowen said:

Mac - You'll not be able to successfully x-ray Hoovers as their database is proprietary. You'll need to be a paid subscriber (not sure free trial is of much use) to gain access. They have incorporated Boolean into their search function for obvious purposes.

Best,

Shane

[Dave Galley]

Mac,

I replied to your PM about this, as well, but I wanted to point out something else with regard to this particular string. One method of testing to see if the string is worth trying, is to try it more broadly first - try running just the string in google without the "site" portion - you will get 0 results.

So it doesn't matter if you only search Hoovers or not, because NO web page indexed by Google meets your criteria. Changing the first portion to "engineer champion technologies" (for "" search, typos matter a lot, actually), still gets very limited results, only a dozen or so. You don't need the second Engineer in this string, BTW. Or you shouldn't.

Changing it to ["champion technologies" (TX OR "Texas") "engineer" -jobs] gives you broader, but still fairly limited results. Since x-ray is really just a method of filtering down/targeting specific sources of information, because the web is too big to do all in one go, when results are so limited in the first place it doesn't really add much value to focus in so close on specific sites.

-Dave Galley

[Mac]

I wanted to share Dave Galley's answers below because, not only does he tell me why but he goes indepth to educate me.

 

Mac,

I guess it depends on what you mean?

All an x-ray search is, is a targeted search to specific site results on a search engine (generally 'surface web' - no login required, relatively static content, etc) like Google, Bing, DDG, etc.

So you can run strings against any site. But many sites (especially those with content they would like you to pay to access - hoovers is a prime example) hide their content from the search engines.

They do this in a couple of ways:

1) The content is never visible - it is dynamically generated in response to queries that only a logged in (paid/subscriber) user can initiate within the site.

2) The content is theoretically searchable but is blocked from search engines through use of the robots.txt convention.

I find most sites do more of #1 than #2, but #2 is still done - just look at www.hoovers.com/robots.txt - you will see which directories it specifically disallows search engines from indexing.

Hoovers does both, really. So you can totally 'x-ray' hoovers, but none of the stuff you actually WANT to find is visible to the search engines, and won't be returned in search results.

The key to a good x-ray search is to understand how the target site organizes its information, what they allow search engines to index, and how the search engines return those results. This will vary significantly from site to site, so it's hard to give good general advice.

As for specific sites I have used... well, this is not actually something I do regularly, so I'm probably not the best person to ask for specific sites to target. Whitepages.com, for instance, is x-rayable for addresses/phone numbers/names, but won't necessarily tell you which person is which, what they do for a living, etc.

Hope that's of some use? Happy to clarify further if you have other questions.

-Dave Galley