I was talking to one of my friends about hunting medical doctors the other day, and through our discussion I came across some pretty interesting ways to find this profession.
For example, many colleges and universities have a public “find a doctor” feature built into their website.
You can find this type of information by conducting a “find a doctor” simple search.
Try this in Google: Find a doctor Texas
Now you can trial and error through some listings of doctors, many leading you to direct contact information.
Here’s another example of a simple search, focusing on directories
Try this in Google: MD “emergency medicine” texas directory
What’s Up, Doximity?
Another way to find doctors is through the site Doximity.com. You can sign up for a free trial through the website, but you can also “x-ray” the site for doctors through the following examples.
For review when a Sourcer says x-ray, we mean using the site: operator in Google to search a specific website. In this case, we want to look through the site doximity.com for specific profiles.
Try this in Google: site:doximity.com inurl:pub “emergency medicine”
Also, try this in Google: site:doximity.com inurl:pub “emergency medicine” texas
Let’s Get Nerdy Like Neo
In the previous post, I went over some ways to index looking via robots.txt and sitemap files.
Noticing trends and patterns through this method of searching can open doors in similar organizations. Keep in mind this is a deep dive method, useful when you have used your normal resources and search avenues. Look for trends and be open to trial and error. It may take some time to pull the results you need.
Go to the main website: http://www.memorialhermann.org
Add /robots.txt to the tail end of the URL
http://www.memorialhermann.org/robots.txt
See the doctors.htm syntax? Through trial and error, this has been identified as a trend for other “find a doctor” databases. Add doctors.htm to the tail end of the main website:
http://www.memorialhermann.org/doctors.htm
That variation led to this massive list, and others like it.
Diving Deeper into the Matrix (and inurl:)
It’s important to note here something about the inurl: operator. inurl: means “contained in the URL.” In the previous examples, you may have noticed the syntax inurl:pub. The “pub” syntax is specific to proximity that denotes this URL is a profile. So we are telling google to “look for profiles” in the URL syntax.
Now let’s take doctors.htm and inurl: put some keywords around them similar to the doximity.com search.
/Doctors.htm Search
Try this in Google: hospital inurl:”/doctors.htm” (Texas OR TX)
Also try this in Google: hospital inurl:doctors.htm (Texas OR TX)
There were better results pulled when using /doctors.htm, but you can use doctors.htm and pull a similar list. You can also pair this search with the intitle: operator.
intitle: means “contains the term,” so if we add intitle:doctors.htm, we may get some other viable results
Try this in Google: hospital (inurl:doctors.htm OR intitle:doctors.htm) (Texas OR TX)
It may seem a little of complicated at first, and much of this is a trial and error type of process. However, it’s pretty amazing what you can pull from organizations with a solid set of keywords (and a few operators). I hope this helps, and happy hunting!