Step 2: Basic Research (Buying a Car)

Back: Step 1 - Basic criteria

Step 2: Do your research
With my basic criteria -- price, car type, transmission -- in hand I set out to find what sort of cars I might consider buying.  In the case of looking for cars, there are plenty of search engines that allow you to search on these (and many more) criteria, so that's what I did ...

... and got 624 matches (click to enlarge)

As you can see, there were plenty of cars that met my basic criteria, and I quickly added another criterion to my list - I sorted on mileage:

New criterion in light of initial search results: low mileage

However, I still had far too many to choose from, but I was heading (driving?) in the right direction.

Tip: Stepping back from the car example for a moment, this is not an uncommon result.  If you are lucky (or very good) your initial criteria will yield a manageable number of options.  However, if your criteria are too tight, you may not have enough (any?) results to work on, which means that you need to  keep looking and/or loosen your criteria by dropping something.  If your criteria are too loose, there will be too many results, and you will need to identify additional criteria.

At this stage there were a few things I could do to help me identify further criteria and thereby trim my results:

Some ways to cut down the list (click to enlarge)

In this case I was happy to use popular opinion as a guide, so I searched online for the most popular cars in my category:

(Chances are someone else has been looking up the same thing on Google)

And before long I had a short list of popular, highly rated cars that met my basic criteria:

Honda Jazz, Holden Barina
 

Ford Fiesta, Hyundai Accent

Suzuki Swift, Toyota Yaris

Next: Step 3 - Detailed research