Keeping Up - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 326

Trapping a thing
“hings” probably make up the bulk of your monitoring keywords, and
that's as it should be. In many cases the “thing” keywords can change oten,
too, depending on whether you're using proper nouns or not.
Proper nouns
Proper nouns, as you may remember from English class, are nouns that name a
speciic person, place, or thing (we're going to focus more on them as things).
here are lots of proper-noun things that act as great query words: brand
names, company names, speciic product model numbers, and so on. If you
can add a product name or model number to your search, it does a tremen-
dous amount for narrowing your results. he problem is that model names
and numbers tend to change a lot. You have to be very vigilant about mak-
ing sure you use the latest model names or numbers in your query.
Take, for example, the iPod Mini. In 2005, it was superseded by the iPod
Nano. If you were trying to monitor for information on lash-memory-
based music players and didn't change your query from “iPod Mini” to “iPod
Nano” you'd be missing out on a lot of potentially good stuf. You always
have an opportunity to change and update your queries as you trap press
releases, reviews, and product updates, so you need to stay vigilant about
these types of changes.
Brand names and company names don't change as oten. Sometimes they
do (KFC was once Kentucky Fried Chicken), but when that happens there's
a lot of hullabaloo about it and you'll get plenty of opportunity to change
your queries. he model names/numbers and brand names are what you
have to watch for.
Common nouns
Common nouns are nouns that are not speciic, such as tree, cat, bottle. You
can oten use common nouns in conjunction with other parts of speech to cre-
ate narrowly deined query phrases, such as “Antique woodworking tools” .
In my experience, common nouns do not change a whole lot once you've done
your initial experimentation and decided on your queries. You may change
how you describe a noun ( “East European woodworking tools” ), but oten you
won't need to change the noun itself. he big exception is technology topics.