Case Studies - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 236

Most of this topic so far has been discussion of tools—things that you can
use to trap information better.
But you may be at the point where having the tools is all very well, but you
need a more concrete sense of when and how you might want to use them.
hat's what this chapter is all about. We look at two hypothetical case stud-
ies: one for inding external information, such as news, reports, discussions,
and so on, and one for inding internal information, such as links and criti-
cal comments.
As you might imagine, setting up a thorough set of information traps can
take a lot of hours and touch on as many as two or three hundred resources.
In one ongoing research job I do, I monitor over 800 separate pages and
1,500 diferent RSS feeds. he case studies in this chapter touch on only the
highlights, or mention resources that might require a certain amount of
caution or query revision. If you ind your own trap-setting involving far
more resources than the ones in this chapter, good for you!
Let's start with Fred, who needs to learn more about outsourcing to Taiwan.
Fred Learns about Outsourcing to Taiwan
Fred works in a company that makes computer parts. His boss recently
asked him to investigate the feasibility of outsourcing some of his compa-
ny's manufacturing work to Taiwan. Fred realizes that what he knows about
outsourcing to anywhere could it in an ant's lunchbox. So while he's dis-
cussing with his boss and others in the company what their needs are and
what they hope to accomplish, he sets up several information traps that will
keep him up to date and inform him about outsourcing.
Step 1: Generating useful queries
Fred decides to go to a fresh information source—a news search engine—and
begin experimenting with query words. He heads over to Google News (news.
google.com) and begins generating queries. He discovers that a simple search
for outsourcing Taiwan yields about 100 results—very manageable—but the
irst ten were published in the last couple of days, meaning he could expect
ive stories a day from this search alone. Fred thinks that may be a little much,
and besides, the stories don't actually it what he's looking for. He narrows his
search a little using outsourcing Taiwan manufacturing .