To exaggerate a bit, almost 90% of the information needed by the foreign trade industry can be collected online. Whether it is troubleshooting of various technical problems, industry information, or even the width of the parking lot in front of your client’s company. The key is how to find the web page where this information is located.
Search engines are of course the first choice for collecting information online. The best comprehensive search engine at present should be Google, and Google’s most commonly used search engines are web search and image search. Web search is commonly used by everyone, but the powerful function of image search is often overlooked. For example, in the image search, enter the English name of your client’s city + MAP as keywords, and it is easy to get a detailed map of the client’s location down to the block. For another example, enter your product name and you can quickly find information about domestic and foreign merchants who produce and sell these products – even more accurate than searching on the web. Because if a product name appears accidentally in the text, it may not be the product that is discussed in the special topic, but if a product image appears, the content is generally very specific.
In recent years, Google has also launched a map tool. For international cities with relatively public data and most places in the United States, you can even see satellite maps with a resolution of 0.6 meters, as if you are there in person.
Similar to the famous search engine, there is Yahoo, which has similar functions.
Although Google is a search engine widely used in the world, each country and region has its own favorite or professional search engine based on its own language. For example, for Chinese, using Baidu search engine http://www.baidu.com, you can often find more and more detailed Chinese web pages than Google.
When using search engines, the choice of “keywords” is the most important. Be imaginative, try more, and pay special attention to the various common names and specialized terms for a certain product in different industries.
Search engines are good, but the disadvantage is that the search range is too wide, and often you can’t find the required information after flipping through dozens of pages. At this time, you need professional websites to make up for it. Professional websites themselves bring together detailed content of related topics, and there are links to similar websites, which are more purposeful than general engines. Therefore, we must learn to “jump”, jump from search engines to professional websites, and then jump from professional websites to related content.
Foreign trade web pages are mostly in English. However, the amount of information on non-English websites such as French, Japanese, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, etc. is also amazing, and there is an advantage that many websites provide bilingual services. In this way, even if you don’t understand a second foreign language, you can still find a lot of useful things and first-hand information through comparison and identification.
After understanding the powerful functions of search engines, you can use them freely in the future. You can even try to find the answer by ignoring a certain sentence in the letter of credit. The reason is simple. Your problem may also be someone else’s problem, and it may have been discussed and answered on a certain website. What you need to do is to find that page.