Find RFPs using Google and other search engines

A basic search for terms associated with request for proposals will return a mix of results. For example, searching google for:

will yield hundreds of thousands of results, but many of these will not be actual RFPs. You will get articles such as this, many RFP examples and RFP templates and websites specializing in RFP listings.

Be Exclusionary

Let us use some of Google's advanced search language to narrow our result set. One of the search operators available to us is exclude, you know it as the subtraction symbol: "-".

Somewhat better results, the RFP templates and example RFPs are no longer muddling up the works. We still have a lot of blog posts and articles. One of the best ways I have found to reduce the number of request for proposal blogs and articles is to exclude the word "tips" and "how to". (The "[]" operator allows for better fuzzy matching: "how to" and "howto".)

Fairly good, most of the articles are gone, now we just need to add once more item to really cut down on the blog results:

That one cut our results almost in half, and the results are looking more like what we are after: a mix of web development RFP listing sites and individual RFPs. You can remove most listing sites by adding a little more to the exclusion clauses. You need to be careful with your exclusions at this point as they may conflict with the contents of the actual RFPs you seek. Adding an arbitrary back date will not hurt you too much as you are mostly interested in future dates and that will take care of most RFP aggregators who may publish outdated listings.

Chances are any RFP with the term January 2010 in it is not one open for existing bids. That takes care of most of the extraneous results, but it still leaves us with a lot of results. If you are still finding RFP websites in your listings and they seem to be helpful you may want to try them. Searching by hand takes a lot of time for spotty results, however if time is what you have...

Focus on the future

The burr in your side for any RFP search using major search engines will be the timeliness of the result set. Generically searching for terms will yield many results, unfortunately those results will mostly be out of date, returning request for proposals past their due date. The easiest way to modify your search is to start using future dates which give you enough time to craft a response to the request for proposal. The opposite of the exclude operator is the include operator: "+",

Try more

This is just a small sample of using advanced search syntax to find RFPs online. If you use your imagination you may find even more results.