40 Straight Word Searching - Search Tactics (Information Research)
Description
This article is from the Information Research FAQ, by David Novak david@spireproject.com with numerous contributions by others.
40 Straight Word Searching - Search Tactics (Information Research)
All search situations allow you to ask for the presence of words in a
block of text. Obviously it helps if you ask for the right word or
words. If you ask for the right words, they you will quickly locate the
information you desire. For best results you obviously want to choose a
word or words which accurately describes what you are looking for.
Prepare to search the text several times with different terms, and
consider the possibility of different spellings for the same words.
Straight word searching is fairly ubiquitous on the internet. You can
always search a webpage with the search function of your web browser.
Alternatively, you can search by placing a large amount of text into a
word processor and using the in-built search functions. Your
word-processor can handle large files like website traffic logbooks and
archived files of past mailing list discussion. There are also
specialist tools like the shareware WinGrep
(http://www.mindspring.com/~bgrigsby/wingrep.html) for searching many
files on your computer hard drive. (Alternatively, consider
AgentRansack http://www.agentransack.com).
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