Sunday, July 16, 2006

Finding New Data for Your Research

On the left side of this article you'll see a link to my MICRO CONTENT PROJECT which contains already 279 postings. The first 50 were quite easy to get: I entered the search words "Star of David" into Google and read the results one after the other. After a few dozen articles the data started recurring in such percentage that I had to change tactics.

I found out that new data is hiding around unique keywords like Capernaum, where one of the oldest Jewish Star of David was found, or Theodor Herzl who promoted this emblem in the Zionist movement. So I started collecting unique keywords on my Microsoft Access.

The question is if we can automate this process. In QTSaver we have a special algorithm. For example: for the query Star of David I got the following announcement: "QTSaver finds that the following words may help you think about what you're looking for... Click on a word to add it to your search query:

Jewish
Symbol
Jews
Shield
Triangle
Flag
Israel
God
Hexagram
Sign
Judaism

A similar result is suggested at
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
where I got for the same query a long list of suggestions arranged by frequency of Searches done in June 2006 :
6019 david star
511 david picture star
399 david jewelry star
306 david meaning star
273 david necklace star
244 david jewish star
243 david star tattoo
222 david foster search star
200 david pendant star
155 david history star

This is good for the first steps of your research, but let me tell you a secret: for what I need after finding data for 279 postings these suggestions aren't useful at all; adding each one of them to my "Star of David" query will bring only more "noise". What I mean by finding unique keywords is more like this:
"As Above As Below"; "boundary stone"; "wedding stone"; " David Alroy"; "David Gans"; " David Hareuveni"; Dormizion; Eder Asher; " Hashomer Hatzair"; " Isaac Luria"…
I don't believe we have such a filter in the market, but I'm working on it, and I'm anxious to read your suggestions.

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