History 513 2007-08 04. Search and Markup

3 Oct 2007

Many search engines work by creating indexes for full text, data structures that pinpoint the location of almost every word. While generally very useful, this has the consequence of increasing the number of irrelevant items in search results. (”Radisson,” for example, can refer to the explorer, a hotel and resort chain, towns in Quebec and Saskatchewan, and so on.) Markup adds disambiguating information within texts.

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Easy. Working with search options. Choose a person from your research. Go the main Google search page, type in the name and keep track of your results. Now you are going to try various options to see if you can make the results more useful or more interesting (it’s your research, so you get to decide). Google allows phrase and boolean searching, negation of terms, synonyms, wildcards and many other options. It also allows you to limit the search by filetype, site, title, url, etc. See The Essentials of Google Search and Advanced Search Made Easy. You might also spend some time playing with Soople.

Easy. Try a search grid. A search grid takes 3-5 search terms and tries each pair. Choosing a few terms from your research, try the search grid option at Find Forward. Are there any unexpected (or unexpectedly productive) results? Find Forward also lets you make a number of other lateral moves from your initial search strategy, like returning possible questions for a given search term, or adding a random word to your search.