Using Google For Compliance Research
Google can be a very effective tool for compliance research. As one of the largest search engines on the web, Google has captured information on billions of web pages. They also deliver blazing fast search results. With a few simple techniques, you can tap this power to get the information you need quickly and accurately.
The simplest search method is to just enter a single word that aptly describes your topic of interest. If you enter "rohs" you will find there are about 626,000 web pages on this topic. Similarly, for "weee" Google returns 813,000 results. Obviously, no one has time to browse through 1.4 million results looking for information on RoHS/WEEE. Furthermore, some of those results are completely irrelevant to compliance work. We can't see the forest for the trees.
In the RoHS results, you will find things like audio retailer Roh's (rohs.com), Dr. Remo Rohs' macromolecule page (remo-rohs.de), and Rochdale Occupational Health Service (rohs.co.uk). The WEEE results contain such items as Weeeee (funnyjunk.com), an Azerbaijan political article (macleans.ca), "this weee is gona be sweeet" (community.webshots.com), and BriarPress Cuts and Caps (oneart.com). Such spurious results can easily be eliminated by taking the next step to more narrowly focus your search.
Single word searches are generally useful only when you just want to browse the top 10 sites for a broad topic. Most of the time, you need to add other words to eliminate some of the irrelevant sites. Considering our two examples above, one approach would be to combine both the words. Google automatically returns results that only match both words. Letter case is not significant. Word order is significant, and will generate different results. "Weee rohs" is different from "rohs weee". The first returns 142,000 results starting with the dti WEEE page. The reverse order returns the same count with pb-free.info as the top page.
The Google advanced search page also supports word exclusion. Searching for WEEE without RoHS returns 434,000 pages, a bit more than half the search for WEEE alone. You can exclude a word without going to the advanced page by simply typing a minus sign in front of the word to exclude. So our example above becomes "weee -rohs" in the main search text box. You can also narrow the results by adding a phrase to the search. Just put quote marks around the phrase. A search for "weee/rohs" produces 19,900 pages. These include numerous variations of punctuation separating the two words (dash, comma, space, etc.). Only the words are considered significant even in a search phrase - punctuation is always ignored.
To illustrate the narrowing process let's consider a parts search problem. Say you want to find some new fasteners to replace ones plated with zinc chromate, which contains hexavalent chromium. You could start with just "fastener" and you would have lots of browsing to do. Add the words zinc and chromate to fastener and you reduce the list considerably. The only problem is that most of the results are for fasteners that are plated with zinc chromate.
So now we try excluding zinc chromate as a phrase. See the table below for the exact syntax. Not much help; the results are only slightly less than the 742 K for fastener. And excluding hexavalent chromium made it worse. Maybe it's time to think about the problem differently.
| Search Term | Results |
|---|---|
| fastener | 742,000 - all sorts of pages |
| fastener zinc chromate | 5,630 - mostly fasteners that are plated with zinc chromate |
| fastener -"zinc chromate" | 739,000 |
| fastener -"hexavalent chromium" | 745,000 |
The regulations don't ban zinc chromate, just the hexavalent chromium that almost always forms when a zinc chromate finish is applied. If we focused our searches on hexavalent chromium instead of zinc chromate, the results will certainly be different.
Using what we learned already, we search for fastener without the phrase hexavalent chromium. Whoops, we just exceeded the results for fastener alone. Time for another tactic change.
What we really want is to tap into the enormous marketing pressures that the RoHS/WEEE directives have inspired among suppliers. Every supplier with something that is RoHS-compliant wants you to know about it. Consequently, these compliant parts are going to be advertised on the web. So all we have to do is search for words that scream compliance.
If our top priority is a compliant fastener with corrosion resistance equivalent to zinc chromate, then we can take at least two ways to this result. A direct path would be "fastener rohs compliant corrosion resistant". Fastener is our most important term, followed by the compliance requirement and then by our corrosion requirement. Another approach is to think like a marketer. What would a marketer say about a compliant, corrosion resistant fastener? My guess is phrases like "hex-chrome-free" or "hexavalent chromium free". Well let's test each approach.
| Search Term | Results |
|---|---|
| fastener rohs compliant corrosion resistant | 35 |
| fastener hex-chrome-free | 13 |
| fastener hexavalent-chromium-free | 45 |
Bingo on the direct approach. There are only 35 pages. The first result links to a manufacturer's FAQ page with several options for our problem. The second result is Tyco's presentation on alternatives to chromate and cadmium.
Of the two market-speak approaches, the second one provided the best results. "Hexavalent-chromium-free" produced detailed information on anti-corrosion finishes, including one that is RoHS-compliant and superior to yellow zinc chromate. Even if you were not happy with the fasteners from Textron, by the time you finished reading all the excellent articles about plating alternatives, you would be ready to talk with a fastener supplier of your choice about adding a new plating process.
Here's another example: tin whisker returns 44,800 results. Adding the word test drops that to 27,200. The second listing, from inemi.org, uses the phrase "tin whisker accelerated test." Googling that set of 4 words returns a highly focused result set of just 6,740 pages. A related search, tin whisker prevention, returns only 962 pages. By thinking logically about the subject, taking cues from the results and progressively narrowing the search, you can easily find web pages that match your needs precisely.
