Search Engines' Help

The advent of the Internet has paved way in the increased information being offered and delivered to people all over the world. In business, Internet has been very vital for firms in gaining competitive advantage and increasing their operation's efficiency and effectivity.

But with all of this information garbled and all mixed-up in the web, how can an individual effectively go through and scan over this huge repository and finding the right information that one is targeting to get or acquire.

This is where the search engines' job comes in. Search engines, according to The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition, is a software program that searches a database and gathers and reports information that contains or is related to specified terms.1 It is basically a website whose primary function is providing a search engine for gathering and reporting information available on the Internet or a portion of the Internet.2

For investors or stockmarket players, search engines are very important in tracking company performances and in determining how well a company's stock has performed. Aside from determining the particular URL of a specific site that provides these information, such as of the Dowjones or Nasdaq, an investor may just go directly to these search engines and key in relevant keywords to get relative or pertinent links.

As a management student aspiring to work as an investment specialist, I decided to take on an experiment to determine for myself if search engines are really helpful in giving relelvant information. I decided to trace DELL's stocks and used these search engines (GOOGLE, YAHOO, ALTAVISTA) to determine how it's stocks are performing.

Using the Famous GOOGLE
Keying www.google.com after opening the Internet Explorer browser, the search engine's cover web page directly appeared. I'm quite impressed with the connection speed. This was maybe because I was the only one using the network (am trying all these in an internet cafe) or the connection speed offered in the cafe was just wonderfully superb, a service I would consider my school providing, hmmm, I don't know when (we are crawling here people).

Entering the keywords dell stock, Google finds 16,300,000 results within .23 seconds, sorting them according to relevance. Clicking on the links, one can see information upon information about DELL's: quotes' summary, its real-time ECN, options and historical prices; performance charts ranging from basic to technical analysis charts; news and info which includes headlines, company events and message boards; the company, providing a profile, key statistics, SEC filings, competitors, industry and components; analyst coverage which includes analyst opinion, analyst estiates, research reports an star analysts; ownership information which gives the company's major holders, insider, transactions info, and insider roster; and financials info which shows the company's income statement, balance sheet and cash flow.

Information about how DELL's stocks have perfomed over the week is easily accessed as well as how its has performed the past years or so. Above is the 5-day progress chart of Dell stocks, from Feb 7 to Feb 13. Above is the 5-year progress chart of Dell stocks.

News, events, company profile and other meaningful information can be accessed through the Internet which search engines easily display and sort for its users. This has fueled the increased importance of search engines and has proved why search engines are truly an internet-novice's bestfriend, it making easy for people to surf the gigantic information waves.

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1 "Search Engine" http://www.ask.com/reference/dictionary/ahdict/58678/search+engine As of 08 February 2006.
2 Ibidem