Case Studies - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 238

interested in—he may want to monitor them. Perhaps a new advocacy group
arises—he'll want to monitor its activity and news. Fred knows that he's of
to a good start, but he also knows that he may have to change his queries and
direction over time.
Fred's next stop is to see if anybody out there is talking about outsourcing
in Taiwan besides his company.
Step 3: Doing group and conversation searches
Fred begins his search at Yahoo Groups. By doing a general search for out-
sourcing , he discovers 508 groups are available! He narrows the search a
bit to outsourcing manufacturing . He inds a few interesting groups and
reviews them. One of the groups looks so relevant to his interests that he
subscribes so that he can read it in its entirety, noting that it has relatively
low traic (only a few posts per day). he other two groups are sometimes
relevant, but not so much that he wants to read them all; they're pretty busy.
For those he runs a few searches based on his original queries, and saves the
results as RSS feeds when that's an option, and when it isn't, he notes the
URLs so that he can send them to a page monitor.
In other situations, Fred might have found that the groups in which he's
interested were private. In these cases, he would have had to subscribe using
his Yahoo account. But he was lucky enough to ind that all the groups in
which he was interested were publicly available.
From there, Fred heads to Google Groups. (As you may remember from the
earlier chapters, Google Groups is a combination of Usenet, a very large set
of public discussion lists, and Google's own discussion groups.) A search of
Google Groups' entire index for Taiwan outsourcing brings mixed results.
On one hand, he's inding some good results. On the other hand, he's ind-
ing too many of them and too much spam. Fred decides to look for indi-
vidual groups instead. If Fred had found a satisfying and relevant number
of search results, he could have chosen to have search results for the entire
index delivered to him as e-mail alerts.
One step forward. . .
Fred remembers that Google Groups ofers far fewer lists than Yahoo
Groups does, and risks a search on a single word: outsourcing . He inds just
150 results, and ater some investigating picks ive that he wants to monitor.