Case Studies - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 239

All the groups that he wants to monitor are extremely relevant to his inter-
ests and have a low number of members (fewer than 50 in each group) so he
picks up the RSS feed for each group and adds it to NewsGator.
So far Fred has not deviated very much from the original queries that he
picked up from his news searches. hat's because he has been searching
mostly for groups, and not for conversations within those groups. Now
Fred is moving to search online message boards (Web sites that contain
online discussion forums), and may discover that his searches will have to
be altered for conversational style.
Fred goes to Yuku (yuku.com), a search engine for online message boards. He
cautiously starts his search using the word outsourcing but gets no results. He
searches for Taiwan , but gets only a few results that don't seem related to busi-
ness. A search for business brings hundreds of results, all far too general.
Fred ponders. How would he pose the issue that he's investigating in an online
bulletin board? Ater a few moments he comes up with this question:
How do I begin outsourcing in my computer manufacturing business?
. . .two steps back?
From that question he developed a new query: “begin outsourcing” and
tried that. his query, while admirably speciic, provided no results. He
gave up and moved on to a diferent search.
Not all resources will provide useful traps to all researchers. Fred tried his
original queries and then generated some new ones that seemed more appro-
priate to his research. While his results were better—a key indicator that his
query revision was working—they were still not useful to his search. At this
point, he could decide to let things lie and move on to the next resource, or
continue to revise his query. In this case, he decided to move on.
Fred has a couple of choices. He can either try to search Google or Yahoo for
more forums, using his query words and words that will be more likely to
ind forums and mailing lists (words like forums , posting , thread , earlier ,
and later ). Depending on how much time he has to set up his traps and how
much time he has committed to reviewing them, he could decide to stick
with the “big two”—Yahoo Groups and Google Groups—or try to ind more
forums related to his interests.