Trapping Topic-Based Information - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 130

but it's worth the $9.95 a month, especially if you're looking for news in
periodicals that cater to a particular industry. here is a 30-day trial period
available, and searching the available libraries is free. Accessing full-text
articles will cost you, however.

Building your queries
Visit Northern Light's Search Help page at nlresearch.com/help.php. North-
ern Light ofers a wide variety of advanced searching, including the ability
to use stemming in your searches. Stemming involves searching for a string
of letters with a special character at the end—usually an asterisk. A search
engine that allows stemming will ind all versions of that string of letters.
For example, searching for moon* would ind moon, moons, moonlight,
moonbeam, and so on.

hints
n

Take advantage of northern Light's ability to narrow the
searches by industry (see the trapping notes that follow).

n

if you're interested in monitoring a particular industry or
business within an industry but you're having a hard time
generating the perfect query, northern Light's search alerts
menu is a blessing.

Trapping
Once you're registered and logged in to Northern Light, you'll see several
tabs. Click My Alerts, and a page displays that has a section labeled My
Search Alerts. From there, you'll see a Create New Alert button. When you
click that button, a form displays for creating a narrowly focused alert ( Fig-
ure 7.14 ).

You can limit your search by business function (sales and marketing, human
resource management, and so on). You can also limit your search by Web-
sites, News, and News Archives, but I recommend keeping the search focused
on Publications, which inds everything. Use the Preview Results button to
check and make sure you're getting a good number of results—not too many,
and not zero. (Use the radio button on the query page to ensure that you're
getting results sorted by date and not relevance, so you can easily see how
many results for your search have been generated in the last few months.)