Help With Using The World's Greatest Management and Leadership Search Engine
 Custom Search
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As part of our commitment to our users, we want to make it easy to find quality material on management and leadership topics. It may be that what we have on site is not what you need, so we created the "World's Greatest Management and Leadership" Search Engine". It has a few features that may be a bit unfamiliar to you, so here are some explanations and hints.
Entering Keywords and Phrases
Our search engine works like most other search engines in that you enter keywords or phrases into the search box. What is a bit different is that our search focuses on articles, and on leadership and management, so you don't always need to input those terms in your searches. For example, let's say you are looking for information on "leadership development". You will find that if you search for "development", virtually all the results you will get back will include articles on management development or leadership developments. It's basically built in.
Also since we focus on articles, you don't need to include that either. There's no harm of course in including it, and perhaps you will want to try it both ways.
Refinements
Refinements are ways we help you find what you want more quickly. They are show at the top of your search results and will appear as links, or as tabs, depending on the page you are on. Each has a label, summarizing what it does. Below is a picture of what it might look like (refinement tabs are subject to change, and also vary from search engine topic to search engine topic.
Let's work through an example.
You want to find out about how companies are developing their leaders so you type in "leadership development". You get a slew of useful results. But let's say you want to find out what Robert Bacal has said about leadership development, or what he has included on his websites (including this one). All you need to do is click on Bacal & Associates Sites, and the results will change to include ONLY the material on Bacal and Associates sites.
The other tabs are also fairly self explanatory.
The first tab with the red arrow includes ALL sources to search thru including those that require a fee. The tab labelled Performance Management and Appraisal (black arrow) is a topic tag. Choose this if you are interested only in the topic. These kinds of tabs may come and go.
The next tab has an orange arrow, and says Pay to View. That means that while there may be a brief summary or abstract available for free, payment (sometimes significant payment) is required to view the entire article. We dislike these sites, but a number of professional journals use this method, so we felt we should use it. Pay to view sites are also included in the first tab (the red arrow), but NOT in the next tabs to come.
Then there is the tab labelled Free to view and reprint. That's the black arrow underneath the picture. This area includes ONLY material that has been released to use without additional permissions. You can view it and reprint it, although it's always good to check the terms of use for each article or site. So, you can put it on your blog, reprint it on paper to distribute to colleagues, etc. Just follow the rules. The problem here is that a good percentage of the articles are very poor, some are just OK, with perhaps one in twenty having anything original or useful to say. We plan on covering the issue of using these sources in a series of articles elsewhere.
Then there is the green arrow that points to "completely free, no registration, no fee" and that's probably what you want to use most of the time. It's the no hassle option, with the highest quality material.
The blue arrow points to the On Bacal's & Associates sites, and it's also a good bet, since we hand pick all material on our sites, and you can focus or Robert's articles.
Finally, the last category tab is "free but requires registration via email" and there's another red arrow pointing to it. Many companies are moving to this option since they will usually use the email you give them to send information to you and try to turn you into a paying customer. Some people hate this, and other's don't. However, there's a lot of good material available through this route. Up to you.