[Chuck Hamrick]

Do any of you search engine gurus know how to do a search for only negative SERPs in Google? If I am researching a company or website and want to see if there are any negative SERPs is there an Boolean operator that can be used?

[Convergence]

Clarify "Negative SERPs" as "negative" is as subjective as "un/ethical"...

[davenaff]

What do you mean by 'negative SERPs'? I could imagine that meaning a bunch of different things... Could you give an example?

[Chuck Hamrick]

Bad comments, ripoffreports, etc. If I only want to see something derogatory about a site or company is there a way to do that?

[davenaff]

There is no search operator to capture 'sentiment'. As it turns out capturing sentiment is a very hard technical challenge.

Your best bet is to try a raft of queries such as:
brand sucks
brand ripoff
brand problems
brand fraud

etc.

[Convergence]

You would have to identify each negative term.

Then in the Google's search box enter your search like this:

merchant-name.com ripoff OR fraud OR scam

Making sure OR is in all caps.

This will pull up any indexed pages with ANY of those terms, ie: ripoff, fraud, scam

[Chuck Hamrick]

So you are telling me that Google isn't psychic? Figured it was a long shot but worth asking.

[markwelch]

Originally Posted by Chuck Hamrick

So you are telling me that Google isn't psychic? Figured it was a long shot but worth asking.

Google's not psychic, but it definitely has some algorithms (thesaurus + related-terms) that sometimes works really well. I wouldn't be surprised if a search for <brandname scam> brought back results that didn't include the word "scam," but instead used phrases like <brandname fraud> or <brandname sucks> or even <brandname warranty> or <brandname return policy>.

But as others suggest, the best strategy is to work up a list of keywords (sucks, scam, cheat, fraud, deceptive, deceit, theft, scum, dishonest) and use a search phrase such as:

+Brandname (sucks OR scam OR cheat OR fraud OR deceptive OR deceit OR theft OR scum OR dishonest)

I just tested this using a couple of major brand names, and got exact the results I expected.

You'd want to grow that list of negative terms, and you might use several terms to isolate different levels of intensity (e.g. "fraud" and "dishonest" are very severe [and perhaps legally actionable], while "sucks" or "scam" or "scum" is a more generic opinion).

I assume that Google's team have also experimented with algorithms that evaluate whether certain keywords (or page) have a positive or negative "orientation" (connotation, denotation, mood, tone, impression, conclusion, whatever), but I haven't seen any evidence of this in search results; I wouldn't be surprised if this turned out to be a minor factor in computing PageRank or Quality Score.

[Chuck Hamrick]

Trying to pick a good one to test this? Then see if I can bookmark the search page and change out brand when I reuse it.

[btabke]

1 word and 1 number, "Radian 6" is the only way I know to do sentiment analysis.

Trying to back track your kw's through logs or webmastertools and sort them out is a hunt-n-peck job.