Guided Web Searching
Alternatives to Reflex Googling:
directed searching & browsing
- Problem: find suitable web resources for project topic
- First thing: establish theme to address, eg how important is Open Source? Is the O.S movement a threat to Microsoft?
(preliminary define what Open Source is. Use Glossary)
- Narrower problem: where to start, what search terms to use.
- Additional problem - we want latest up-to-date stuff, not info that’s out of date.
Alternatives:
- Google ‘open source’.
results don’t answer the question you started with
- narrow search term. But what search term to use - you want to use a term that discovers something useful. Chicken & egg situation.
- start with a site that condenses or reports on Info Tech news or topics. Some examples:
- WebReference Update newsletter archive
This is an excellent source for starting to find relevant stuff.
[Search through the browser page (with Ctrl-F) for “Open Source” - which links do you think would useful & which not? Now follow 2 of the links to their sourcee & save the URLs. Go back to this page and search for a term from your own project.]
- Tomalak’s Realm is another useful starting point but it’s a bit more tedious to find things here. There’s a list of useful topics on the home page, but it seems that you just have to browse through the links to find what you’re looking for.
- I’d like you to subscribe to one or both of the email newsletters which are sourced from these sites. Create a new email folder and after you get your first newsletter message create a filter that moves it into the mailbox.
- Wired news and magazine is an excellent source of easy to comprehend articles. The links from within this site are almost always a source of top material.
- Clay Shirky’s Writings About the Internet
Thoughtful pieces about various topics concerning the internet.
Posted by markp at September 09, 2004 01:00 PM
| TrackBack