Finding Information for Groups of Countries

Sometimes you don't want to do research on a single country, but rather get comparative information on several countries at once. To do that you should employ the Principle of Mass Similar. You can apply it to international searches, too. In this case let's say you want to get search results about exports, focused on Asia. Apply the Principle of Mass Similar and include several Asian countries in your query along with the simple keyword “exports.”

Japan Korea China Mongolia Malaysia exports

Even though you're using a lot of keywords, you're getting a lot of results. In fact, you might be getting too many. If that's the case, then narrow down your search a bit:

Japan Korea China Mongolia Malaysia exports "circuit boards"

That worked beautifully! But always start with a general keyword in this case. You're already narrowing down your searches with the several country names. Don't over-narrow your search results right off the bat.

This search works well for a region in the world. How about the world itself? Sure. The only thing you need to do is to include countries from every point of the globe; don't concentrate them in one region. Let's go back to the exports question, only let's try a different set of countries:

Japan Denmark Canada Brazil "South Africa" "Saudi Arabia" exports

You'll notice that these results aren't as neat as the results for the first country search you did; that's because this set of countries isn't easy to categorize. But as you add additional keywords, the search results will start getting more focused.

Because of its intimidating size and constant expansion, it's not easy to think of the Internet as a source for local information. But as you can see, it's easy to get information on an area as small as a zip code or as extensive as a country. The trick is to know unique identifying numbers (in the case of a zip code) or potential ways to group large items (in the case of countries).