Mindmapping Helps Manage Google Search Results

Google is a great search tool.  We’ve all “googled” for something.  Yet, the drawback of Google is managing the search results.

The search results appear as links that, depending on your screen resolution, give you about 9 search results.

Let’s say we were interested in Project Management.  We would type “Project Management” in the Google search box.  This would produce the follow results:

(Click image to enlarge)

However, if we did the same search using MindManager, an industry standard mindmapping program, we could easily increase the search results, to say 20, and it would look like this:

(Click mindmap to enlarge)

Every search result (or sub-topic) on the mindmap contains both an active URL link and a note about the search result.

We can also “refresh” the search with one click.  So, if we saved the mindmap and came back a week later, we could simply click the refresh icon to update search results:

(Click mindmap to enlarge)

So far we’ve just looked at searching for one topic.  But what if we wanted to search for multiple topics?

Doing things the old way, we would have to replace the “Project Management” search with a new search topic.  But with mindmapping we can simply add another search topic to the mindmap.

Let’s say we wanted to add a search for the “iPhone 4” (a pretty hot topic right now).  To do this we simply add a topic called “iPhone 4″ and use MindManager’s Google Search feature to generate our search results.

Our result would look like this:

(Click mindmap to enlarge)

As you can see we are able to keep both search results.  We can also expand or collapse search topics to make room for additional topics.

These two search examples illustrate how mindmapping software enables you take full control of your search results and manage them in ways that extend the value of Google.

I find this incredibly useful when I’m doing research using Google.  What do you think?

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