Building Queries - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 76

of these data pools are constantly being added to and updated. You want to
make sure you get a manageable number of results that completely covers
your topic. hat's the goal. hat's your mantra: manageable but complete,
manageable but complete.
practicing the theory of onions
Getting too many results for general searches will always be a problem
when using search engines with large pools of data (which amounts to
pretty much any Web search engine, news search engine, and so on).
When developing queries, I advocate practicing “the theory of onions” to
narrow a search as much as possible. his involves irst developing a query
for your topic that is as tight and speciic as you can—condensed, like the
middle of an onion. hen you run that search and see what kind of results
you get. Are they manageable? Probably, if your query was very speciic. Are
they complete? Probably not, if your query was as speciic as it should have
been. Next, make your query a little more general—unwrap it like you're
moving out through the layers of an onion. Run the query again. Ask your-
self the same two questions: is it manageable? Is it complete? Repeat this
process until you're getting a good number of search results without feeling
like you've been hit by the equivalent of a data irehose.
Experiment on your own a little using the theory of onions and see what
happens. Most people are so used to plugging a couple words into a search
engine and going to town that they don't really “get” the idea of building as
speciic a query as possible. If you're having problems understanding how
to start with a very speciic search query, here are some possible solutions
that might get you unstuck.
. Your language isn't unique enough. Every topic has words of its
own—its own vocabulary. A great example of this is medical terms.
If you want to monitor causes of abdominal pain, a search for “stom-
ach ache” will get you one level of results, while searching for “peptic
ulcer” or “gastrointestinal relux disease” will get you an entirely
diferent, more technical level of results. If you are familiar with it,
try to include the language of your topic in your search queries. It will
help you immensely in narrowing down your results.