Trapping Topic-Based Information - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 110

Trapping
Ask doesn't ofer RSS feeds or e-mail alerts. As a workaround, visit the Pref-
erences page (ask.com/webprefs) and change your result number to 100.
hen do the searches you want and save the results in a page monitor. To
narrow your search further, you can also use the Advanced Search page to
restrict your results to more recently updated pages.
I am less excited by Ask's current status (though it's good) than by its future
possibilities. In the past couple of years, the company has made huge strides
in the online search engine world, mostly by doing things a little bit difer-
ently than the established search engines. Watch Ask for tools that will be
useful to you, the information trapper.
Possibilities
Take advantage of Ask's search suggestions and quick preview tools:
. Can Ask's search suggestions help you reine your queries at all?
. Ask's Preview tool is the place to quickly review large numbers of
sites, so that you don't have to visit each one. Take advantage of the
binoculars feature.
Microsoft Live search
Yahoo and Google are the major search engines right now. But of course
things can change very quickly. And when a ive-ton gorilla like Micro-
sot enters the scene, you can almost count on things changing. Microsot
entered the search engine arena with MSN Search, but it has rebranded its
site as Microsot Live Search (live.com/?searchonly=true). his new search
engine should be on your list of resources to trap, partially because Micro-
sot is working incredibly hard to become a major player, and partially
because it's put together a few interesting innovations ( Figure 7.4 ).