The Bourne Ultimatum was the box a few nights ago (yes, I know this is 2010), and I figured that as I might be the last person alive who has never watched it I should give it a go.

Turned out to be *quite* good too, if you like lots of punch ups, hokey technology, and a vaguely interesting plot. It wasn’t any of these things that piqued my interest though, it was the idea that the guy is a covert operations type, who can generally ninja his way through life, BUT his Googling was pretty average, no, pretty lame.

Case in point, he uses to Google to find the company Sewell and Marbury, for some reason I can’t remember:

Luckily they were #1 so he didn’t have to dig much further. But if they weren’t #1 what would he have done? scrolled through 3 pages? gone to Yahoo!? added speech mark operators (“search query here”)? Added full stops as well (“search.query.here”)? started guessing at URLs and then doing “site:” searches? Rooted around in WHOIS? Got a proper spy to find them?

My point is that Jason Bourne isn’t much of a spy if he can’t even bother with the basic Google operators. The pay off is that we can all be better than him at Googling if we remember the basics:

• If information is not, and never has been, publicly available on the internet you’ll have real problems finding it there.
• The trouble is that you can only start to work this out once you’ve spent an age searching.
• SEO guys like me influence what rises to top of search results for commercial reasons (Jason Bourne can’t do that, again he’s rubbish).
• Shrewd use of operators and tweaks can help you root out what you want, all it takes is practice and trial and error.

There’s a smashing little guide here which will get you started, and this query should give you plenty to read as well.