Eva Lang (Valuation Products & Services and Financial Consulting Group) advised the audience at the AICPA National BV Conference that there are better ways to use Google than entering one or two keywords.

Here are a couple of search tips Lang provided:

• When using a search engine like Google,use quotes“” to search for a phrase. For example, “Discount for Lack of Marketability”
• Use the hyphen to pick up adjacent words. “health-care” gets results including: health care and healthcare
• The tilde ~ retrieves synonyms, for example, typing in ~physicians will also retrieve physicians, doctors and medical 

Lang also said that the Google and the web is just one source data necessary for BV research, and said fee-based sources are also necessary for certain types of projects.  Some of these sources include:

• Alacra
• BV Resources
• Key Value Data
• ValuationProducts.com
• ValuationResources.com
• First Research
• IBIS World
• MarketResearch.com
• BizMiner
• MicroBilt Integra
• RMA
• Mercer Capital
• Lexis-Nexis