How To Save Money On Dates & Dating

The best way to save money on dates is to use competitive intelligence on them BEFORE you start dating.

OK, so you think you have found Ms. Right (instead of Ms. Right-Now) and she is not a Russian mail-order bride (that was pretty expensive, you know – and her picture, well it must have been taken when she had all her teeth).

Rather than go out and spend big bucks on Ms. Right from the get-go at one of those really expensive Denny’s or Starbucks places, well, spend a few minutes online and do a litte “competitive intelligence” and you can save a lot of money.

Note to all you guys who don’t, quite yet, have someone lined up, and you are tired of stalking Eva Mendes (give it up, it won’t work – I know), you can try the techniques below on yourself as practice.

Eva Mendes blowing a kiss to me at my sentencing.

Just Google It

The first step, “Just Google It.”  Yeah, go to Google, type in what the name of the person and see what comes up. Yeah, that was easy. But, what if the name you search is something common like Mary Johnson and you find there are 100,000 results? You might think your new girlfriend to be is awfully popular.

But soon realize that there are quite a few people with the same name. So what do you do to search and find your “Mary?” Here is what you do – you use Boolean Search techniques.

Boolean Search and Logical Operators

Essentially you take the same search phrase and employ a bit of Boolean logic. No, that is not some wizard spell from Dungeons and Dragons, but it is a way to force the search engine to be more precise in finding what you want. There are several techniques you will employ:

Use “doublequotes.” Doublequotes are the quotations marks on both sides of the name you are searching, in this case, “Eva Mendes,” oops, I mean “Mary Brown” (I hope that court-sanctioned restraining order of 50 miles doesn’t apply to the internet).

The “doublequotes” makes the search engines find the words you searched immediately next to each other. An example is if you search the phrase Cost Coach. You might get one result that finds a page with the statement, “It sure cost me a lot when I hit my coach…” Or, if you are using one of those fancy-Nancy iMac Apple machines, you might get a result like, “Coach handbags cost a lot.” But when you search for “Cost Coach” you get exactly the result you are seeking.

Use AND: OK, for some of you challenged people who don’t speak American well, well, this could be tricky. I wills type slooooowly for yous. This is what you do to find more about the person you are seeking. Use both doublequotes and the phrase AND. It goes like this, to further refine your search take the main phrase, say, “Eva Mendes,” and then you add the word AND with another phrase you get something like this

“Eva Mendes” AND “restraining order”

If you are searching “Cost Coach” AND “save money”

You can also use a “+” sign, as in

“Cost Coach” +”save money”

Use NOT: To get even a bit more tricky, you can use the operator NOT which means, yep, you guessed it, not…

Let’s say I was searching for Eva (I’m not) and I know she just left Los Angeles, but I don’t where she is going, but she will be making a new movie, so I could search something like

“Eva Mendes” NOT “Los Angeles” AND “new movie” AND 2010

or, alternatively

“Eva Mendes” -“Los Angeles” +”new movie” +2010

If you are searching “Cost Coach” AND “save money” AND “Competitive Intelligence”

You could also search “Cost Coach” +”save money” +”Competitive Intelligence”

More Ways To Find People

OhMiGawd! I almost forgot about Mary Johnson. Here are some searches you can do to find here

Her City: Search for “Mary Johnson” +”city”

Her School: Search for “Mary Johnson” +”school”

Her Job: Search for “Mary Johnson” +”employer”

Her Cell Phone Number: Type in her phone number, as follows, with the hyphens  555-555-5555

Her Email Address: Assume her email is BlackWidow2@aol.com. You could search just for “BlackWidow2@aol.com” (using doublemark quotes) as that will find any traces of that email. Also, often when someone has a “2” in their email, it generally means that they had a “1” or “none.” So you would search “BlackWidow1@aol.com” and “BlackWidow@aol.com” as well.

Her Partial Email Address: Assume her email is HatesCheapMen16@aol.com. You could search just for “HatesCheapMen16” as that will show you if she use that portion of her email address as her user name (happens alot).

Search the social networks. Start with Facebook and Twitter, but be sure to search MySpace as quite a few people still have their old profiles active there.

OK, I know this will work for you. It worked for me. Just ask Eva.