Building Queries - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 86

Searching within conversations
When you think about searching within a conversation, whether it is a
mailing list or an online form, try to think about how you'd talk about your
topic. Create queries that relect how you'd verbally discuss the topics.
If you're focusing on conversations that professionals are having, try to use
their vocabulary. (If you're monitoring mailing lists of medical profession-
als, try to use medical terminology.) When you're monitoring for technical
information, you can get a little geekier and use model numbers or ver-
sion numbers. Read through some of the types of conversations you want
to track so that you can get a sense of the kind of language that's being
used. Remember the example earlier in the chapter where simply searching
for the phrase “cardiac arrest” and removing the phrase “heart attack”
changed the results so dramatically?
And take advantage of the advanced search forms. Tag searches don't have
a lot of advanced options, but many conversations do. Use the available spe-
cial syntax to narrow your results.
nOte
We're just scratching the surface of tags and conversations with
a few words to get you thinking about how to generate queries
when approaching these resources. We'll get into some serious
digging later on.
he next few chapters examine the “where” of information trapping.