Building Queries - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 75

External information is everything else. As you might imagine, the concept
of external information is much larger and much more inclusive than inter-
nal information. he challenge with external information lies in building
the perfect query to trap information of interest because there are so many
ways to describe and express a topic, idea, or even a name. For example,
say you want to monitor the news for mentions of George W. Bush (which
is way too general a thing to want to monitor, but more about that in a
moment). Do you monitor for “George Bush” , “George W. Bush” , “George
Walker Bush” , “GW Bush” , or something else entirely?
Getting the most out of the search engine
he fact that any topic can be expressed in a huge number of diferent ways
(and therefore via a huge number of diferent queries) means that you've
got to know a little bit about how to get the most out of a search engine.
Yes, there are a huge number of queries you could use to track your topic.
But only a few of them will work well. In addition, you've got to consider
the size of the data pools where you'll be trapping. Google News has over
4,500 sources. Google Web had over eight billion pages at last count. Both
M anageable But What?
Manageable but complete is a great guideline. But at some point you may ind yourself getting
an overwhelming amount of information. You've got your queries as narrowly focused as
possible, but you're not able to keep up with what you're getting. Which one should you give
up—manageable or complete?
sacriice completeness for manageability. getting complete coverage of your topic won't mean
anything if you're drowning in feeds and alerts and can't make use of what you already have. (i'm
not even sure that complete coverage is possible for all but the most obscure topics.) drop back
to alerts and notiications from whatever you consider your “core sources,” whether they're
news search engines, journals relevant to your topic, an rss feed search engine like Feedster, or
something else. From there you can slowly add more sources until the results are as manageable
and as complete as you can handle.
remember: you're doing this to track a topic and expand your knowledge. You're not doing
this to overstress yourself and drown in information. Okay? if you can't have complete and
manageable, make sure manageable comes irst!