Search Before You Sell
This is my first blog post, so let me introduce myself. My name is Dave Gaetano, Director of Business Development at The JAR Group. I am a Syracuse University graduate majoring in Finance, minor in Economics. I am also a graduate of the University of Connecticut School of Law, and a licensed Connecticut attorney.
Besides the benefits of being able to cheer for two major athletic programs, I bring a vast background to The JAR Group. I have been with The JAR group one year, and look forward to introducing our services and capabilities to you.
My first exposure ever to the wonders of computers talking to each other came in 1989 at Syracuse University. I was taught how to ping the Syracuse airport for a weather report by an engineering friend. Being a weather nerd in a Snow Belt city, I found this entirely entertaining, but useless to the outside world.
My roommate senior year was also a computer engineer who showed me some of the message boards available in the early 1990’s. Fascinating I thought, but when will this ever be useful? To ping someone and ask “What’s up?” Wow…
At my first job, on Wall Street, the IT guys showed me how to send a message to other users logged on to the system. It was very enjoyable to send
messages to someone else’s screen that said “Sign off now before all your data is corrupted.” So aside from weather reports and harassing co-workers, this was the extent of the benefits of connected computers to me.
Flash forward to 1994. I’m onto my second job working residential real estate and also an avid music fan; specifically, a Bruce Springsteen fan. Now, anyone who knows a fanatical Boss fan knows we are unique to say the least. We seek out every show, tour information and minutiae of details on what, where, and when Bruce will be next.
I heard of these places on CompuServe and these newsgroups called rec.music.artists.springsteen, and these things called e-mail mailing lists! Well, now I had to plug in that modem and figure this all out. I was hooked up through CompuServe and then what became AOL pretty quick, and became well versed before most of my peers on this new internet thing.
Of course, I couldn’t have found any of the Springsteen info (or info on any of the other numerous musical acts I follow) without the wonderful “Search Engine.” I first started playing around with Archie, veronica and jughead….characters I was more familiar with more so through comics than computers and internet search.
Archie basically archived ftp directories. Veronica and Jughead went a step further and used the gopher indexing system. I was pretty novice
at all this, and was in heaven when these gophers evolved into spiders and I found sites like webcrawler.com and excite.com. With this new service, I was the envy of my friends and family, who came to me with a litany of questions that I was able to answer with just a few minutes on one of these magical search engines.
But still, my passion was music, and search has changed my life by introducing me to numerous friends who shared the same interests. Opening up new doors to hard to find bootlegs, ticket information and secret shows and appearances. By searching newsgroups and mailing lists, friendships were forged with over music lovers. Ease of ticket buying was attained and I soon found myself in new cities putting faces to names. So one way search has changed my life is in how I find new music, information on music I like, and finding friends sharing the same interests.
Search also has dramatically changed the way I purchase goods and services. I have always been a comparative shopper, loving saving a dollar here or there through my research. I always sought out the consumer magazines and scoured the Sunday ads for where I could find a product for just a tad cheaper. Naturally, search engines were the way to go.
I could now research the product I was looking for, seek out the cheapest prices, and compare sellers. My first house in 1999 was furnished with numerous items I purchased online. Comparative shopping bots? Are you kidding me? Right up my alley.
While many thought I was crazy for buying things “online”, (What if they steal your credit card!) I was enjoying the hundreds of dollars I was saving on products and I naturally knew the retailer I was purchasing from was valid due to search.
When I bought a car in 2000, there was very little information online about auto buying. But, using search, I was able to learn dealer’s costs and hidden incentives, saving me thousands. Going into the purchase with this information turned the tables in my favor. I helped my parents
with their purchase of a car soon after, saving them thousands, and looking like their favorite son- even if I was an only child.
I continued to be ahead of the curve by using search to save money on travel, clothes, furniture, and electronics. I remember first finding deals via search with Priceline and Expedia. Granted, nowadays, nearly everyone goes to the web first when making a purchase. But, if you look at how search has changed the shopping process, I think you’ll agree that it has leveled the playing field.
No longer can your local electronics store or car dealer think it has a monopoly on you. It has educated the buying public and given them
tools to make the purchase process fairer and more cost effective. At the same time, it has also forced businesses to provide excellent customer service, lest someone be able to search out bad customer service via the internet. It has also forced retailers to become more creative in this crowded environment.
Search has completely altered the buying process. It has forced consumers and retailers to educate themselves, refine their practices and at the same time put more money in each other’s pockets.
And that is not a bad thing.
The Jar Group is an expert in this field. We welcome the challenge in improving your brand or website’s position on all the major search engines. We go beyond market and keyword research in testing, experimenting and discovering new ideas to benefit our clients.
