Check out the results from these search queries to get a sense of the dynamics of Internet search in retrieving known information about your subject from search engines. We know that the same query on Google web, news and archive news products will return different links. But also, even if your query phrases are in the text of a result, that link won’t necessarily be returned. I started a Google web search with the phrase “securities dealers” and one link caught my eye, a 1963 news report that mentioned “Harry N. Geisler,” so I made him my subject and did a reverse search to see if I could retrieve the same news report. You can identify relevant terms from the story to tailor your search.

The name Harry N. Geisler from the St. Petersburg Times is buried deep in the report. If you web search “Harry N. Geisler” you won’t get this article.

A web search with the combination: “National Association of Securities Dealers” “florida” “geisler” shows over 1600 entries. The first result is a Florida paper with his 1993 obituary, which doesn’t mention the securities disciplinary action. There’s no mention of our subject in the next 100 links. But a Google news archive search results in one relevant hit, a New York Times article, which names him as Harvey, not Harry Geisler. The mention of Geisler is on page 48, which you only find by scrolling through the article.

Then, searching “harvey n geisler” in Google web will get you to an SEC report on the disciplinary action.

But then there’s more. When you conduct the same search in Google news archive a result points to another way to form the name: “HN Geisler”, and to continue your digging.