Trapping Topic-Based Information - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 119

search engines. You never know when a newspaper's Lifestyle or Hobby sec-
tion is going to interview some woodworker with the world's largest old
tools collection.

As you might imagine, several of the search engines offer their own
news searches, but there are independent ones as well. We look at both
in this section.

Yahoo news
Yahoo News (news.yahoo.com) looks somewhat overwhelming when you
irst get to the front page. here's lots of news links, multiple tabs to vari-
ous types of news, and even pointers to several other sites on Yahoo. Don't
worry about any of that. What you want to do is search, and searching will
cut through all this extraneous stuf. he Advanced Search page is located
at search.news.yahoo.com/usns/ynsearch/categories/advanced/index.html.

Building your queries
When you're using the Advanced Search page, set the results to sort by date
instead of by relevance ( Figure 7.9 ).

he rest is up to you. Note that Yahoo divides the news into categories,
which is one way to narrow your searches without having to igure out
query words, and might be useful to those of you doing tricky searches. Say
you're trying to track news about certain pharmaceutical businesses. Using
Yahoo News' advanced search, you can search for the word pharmaceutical
in the business category and get a start on a good query. From there you'd
probably want to add the names of drugs, companies, and so on that you
were trying to track. But the business category would ensure that you were
getting more business-oriented results, and not science or medical results.

hints
n

Take advantage of the category offerings of Yahoo news.

n

Use the location syntax. if the topic in which you're interested
has a geographical area, the location syntax can be a blessing.
The advanced search page notes that you can search by state
and by country, but in many cases you can also search by city
as well. Try entering a search term and enter austin in the
location box. notice that your search results are restricted to
media in austin, including television stations and newspapers.
nifty, huh? This is great for localized information trapping.