Trapping Tags and Conversations - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 211

Yes, you do get a list of relevant groups, but on the right you get another
search box with the option to search for more lists or—and this is the
important bit for you—search messages!
But let's look at the groups irst. he search results for groups don't give
you as much information as, say, the search results for Yahoo Groups,
but if you click on the name of the group in the results you get an addi-
tional information page that includes the number of subscribers and the
approximate list activity, as well as a link to read the archives if they're
readable by anybody. Use this information to determine list activity and
how you want to monitor it.
Back to the message results. Your search results will initially list posts in
order of relevance, I believe. Click the date header to resort them by date, as
you see in Figure 9.13 .
Figure 9.13 sorting by date in Topica gives you the oldest results irst.
When you normally resort items by date, what do you get? You get a list with
the newest items irst. In this case you get the oldest items irst, so what you
have to do is scroll to the last page of the results and monitor that. Mostly
what you're monitoring is changes to that page's content and the addition
of another page of search results. It's awkward, and I only occasionally ind
useful results here, but Topica is still active enough that I would at least look
at the lists it hosts and consider adding it to my information trapping list.