Trapping Topic-Based Information - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 108

Possibilities
. A directory is your chance to use more general keywords than you
would with a full-text search engine. So experiment with all those
two-and-three-word queries that were getting you too many results
in the Google searches. What directory categories are they matching
up to? Are they categories that would be worth monitoring?
. What happens when you search for as general a topic as you can? Are
you coming up with useful directories? Would it be worth it to dig
down into some subdirectories and see what you ind?
ask
Several years ago, Ask Jeeves (the company has retired the butler and changed
its name to Ask) was the serious also-ran of the search engine world—
a deinite third-tier search engine. Now, more and more, Ask (ask.com) is a
deinite player ( Figure 7.2 ).
Figure 7.2 ask has a very basic home page. Tools on the right point you to additional search options.
Ask used to be known as a “natural language search engine,” that is, you
could enter your search as a question and Ask would interpret your search
and (hopefully) ind what you were looking for, either on the Web or in its
own index of questions. Now it's more of a full-text engine, having inte-
grated technology from Teoma, a search engine company that Ask pur-
chased a few years ago.