The number of hits returned by Google and Yahoo after each search request can be controlled by TopicCrunch. The number of hits returned by MSN cannot – it depends on the settings that you have requested and saved, and these will be saved in a cookie. So before starting TopicCrunch, for the very first time, open a web browser and go to http://search.msn.com/ (or http://search.live.com) click on Options, then on Change your search settings... and under Results, make sure the Show results drop-down says Show [50] results. Also, in the box after “Group results from the same site. Show the first…” choose 1 “results.” If you are mainly interested in English results, the select the appropriate radio button and the English checkbox. At the time of writing, MSN is providing 1.6 million hits for one particular search term (mind mapping) if English alone is selected and, mysteriously, 0.8 million if "All languages" is selected. We hope that MSN will fix this soon.Then click the Save button.
You must then accept the cookie (if you see a warning) and start TopicCrunch.
You should not need to do this again unless the MSN cookie gets deleted. (See FAQ Too many search units).
After starting TopicCrunch, and working from the left column of controls to the right across the window please do the following: 1. Fill in the Search Term and variation boxes. Think about variations in spelling, singulars and plurals, closely-related terms. For example if searching for material about getting yourself organized, you might choose the following four search term variations: "get organized", "get organised", "getting organized" and "getting organised"; or "mindmapping", "mind mapping", "mindmap"; "mindmaps" 2. If you just want a list of all domains found when searching with the terms just entered, move on to item 3 (below). If instead you want to find the position of a specific domain in the search results for a set of keywords (Domain search), fill in the Domain name in the box. If you want to know where that domain is, but just for the best search term on each engine, select the "Best hit only" checkbox. This is will often be faster. If you don't select "Best hit only", it will show you the position of each search term variation on each engine. There's more about Domain-ranking searches below. 3. Select how you want the output web page sorted - by domain name alphabetically; by highest hit position in any engine; or by average highest hit position across all engines selected. When the search is complete you can change the sort sequence and request a new web page or spreadsheet of results. The search itself will not be re-done, of course, just the preparation of the report. 4. Select the engines to use. 5. Select the number of hits to request. If you are just looking for market leaders, 20 or 40 should be enough 6. Select the Sleep Time. After each search unit (100 returned search hits, on one search engine, for one search term), TopicCrunch will sleep for a few seconds to avoid grabbing too much search engine time and as a result being penalized (and possibly banned). This drop-down allows you to select the time in seconds. The shorter a sleep time you select, the greater is the likelihood of your IP address being banned for a while from a search engine. See Sleep time below. 7. Click Start deep search and TopicCrunch will pull in the search results, analyze ranking on these search terms, filter out all search result text other than the domains, remove duplicate references to each domain, and prepare a hyperlinked page of results.
Because TopicCrunch does not hammer the search engines for results but requests them politely after timed pauses, it cannot provide instant results. It is usually best to leave the analysis running in the background and work on another task. 8. At any time (including while a search is in progress) you can save the criteria for the current search, to make it easier to repeat later.
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