Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Possibilities
Try to see what you can pull out of Yahoo's specialty searches:
.
Is there potential for articles related to your topic?
.
Should you be searching Creative Commons content to see if
there's material you can license and use on your site or quote from
on your site?
In addition to the Web site, Yahoo has a directory, which you can also
monitor. Monitoring directories, as we've discussed, is a little diferent
than monitoring full-text search engines. Your queries have to be more
general. In the case of Yahoo, it's also easier because of some of the RSS
feed oferings.
Yahoo Directory
Yahoo's Directory (dir.yahoo.com) is just what it sounds like: a search-
able subject index of sites and descriptions. In my experience, it is not as
dynamic as Yahoo's search engine, but is still useful to monitor. And Yahoo
makes it a little easier too, depending on what you're looking at.
Building your queries
For searching most directories, I don't bother to build queries. Instead I
peruse the directory structure and ind the subcategories that most accu-
rately relect what I'm interested in.
Say I'm interested in lions. I browse the directory, from Science to Animals
to Mammals to Lions. he subject “lions” has its own page, but there's also a
category for Ligers and Tigons (lion/tiger hybrids). As of this writing, there
are only ive links on this page, so it would be easy to monitor this URL
using a page monitor.
In general, the deeper you go into the subcategories, the shorter the list of
sites for each subcategory will be. But if you must monitor a general category,
I recommend checking to see whether Yahoo Directory has an RSS feed for
the latest update. he directory doesn't have feeds for every category and
subcategory, but it does have an extensive number of feeds for higher-level
categories. You can see it at
http://dir.yahoo.com/rss/dir/index.php.
For the
most part, these feeds don't go more than one or two levels deep.
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