Forbes Insights, in association with Google, surveyed more than 350 executives at U.S. companies with annual sales exceeding $1 billion about their use of the Internet.

The survey categorizes Generation PC as executives under 50 and Generation Netscape as those under 40.

The findings demonstrate clearly that top executives are actively using the Internet on their own to find information online. The primary findings from the survey are:

• A generational shift is occurring in the C-suite that is transforming how they use the Internet.
• The Internet is the C-suite’s top information resource.
• Members of the C-suite search for information themselves.
• When they go to locate information, the C-suite first turns to mainstream search engines.
• Video and online networks are emerging as C-suite tools.
• Executives in IT are the most prevalent users of the Internet for information gathering.
• Executives under 40 (Generation Netscape) are the most willing to engage with emerging Internet technologies, such as social media.

Download The Rise of the Digital C-Suite: How Executives Locate and Filter Business Information (PDF / registration required).

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by Chris Anderson

Chris Anderson is the editor of Wired and author of the The Long Tail, a best-seller about the Internet economy.

Free! is his exploration of the past, present, and future of free as a business model.  Anderson provides a retrospective of free, including King Gillette’s marketing revelation to give away razors in order to sell disposable blades, and the rise of advertising to support free media.  Anderson also delves into Google’s business model and explains how the search-engine giant can afford to give away applications, virtually unlimited e-mail, free 411 services, etc. to improve its ad sales.

Sticking with his theme, Anderson has made the entire book available for free as  a downloadable audiobook.

(The complete book is available as a free e-book on scribd.com, but scribd was having technical difficulties at the time of distribution.)

Read more about Free! on publishing veteran Rex Hammock’s
blog.

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3. Make Your Web Site a Real-Time Machine

Next time you want to find an article from a specific website, try using Google’s “site:” option. For example, if you wanted to search “economy” at forbes.com, you would type economy site:forbes.com in the Google search box.

See more Google search tips

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Next time you’re away from a computer and have a question, try texting Google SMS for the answer. Simply text your query to 46645 (GOOGL on most phones), and Google will send you a restaurant listing, look up the definition of a word, find the price of a product, or even calculate a tip.

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Google to the max

As part of their “Finding Research-Quality Websites” class, two teaching librarians at the University of California at Berkeley have assembled an outstanding tutorial for getting the most out of your Google searches. The tips show you how to exclude words from your search, look for synonyms to search terms, and search using number ranges. Happy searching.

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3. Snap.com

www.snap.com

We don’t doubt Google and its ability. However, sometimes, you need a little fresh approach to the search engine. Snap.com presents information in a user-friendly dashboard format that shows search results on the left side and the actual websites that correspond to the search results on the right side of the screen. Snap.com also has features making it easier to navigate the results themselves.

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3. Print Screen