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Researching Your Novel
On the Internet
by Sandi Price

Believe it or not, there is so much information on the Internet, you may never have to go to the library again. The trick is in finding it. If you have a lot of research to do and little time, try surfing the Net between 4:00 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. That’s when it’s going to be the fastest. There are several ways to do research, but the easiest is through the use of search engines.

A search engine is simply another piece of software that can help you find what you need on the Internet. New search engines come on line frequently, but ones used most often are Google, Yahoo, AOL, Yahoo, Infoseek and Magellan.  Different search engines may look for different things. One may look for key words in the titles of documents, another will search all links for key words. A third will search the entire text of the documents in its base. You should try out a number of search engines to become familiar with what each one does. Eventually you’ll find yourself using the same search engines most of the time.

Keep these basics in mind when searching:

1. Know what type of things the search engines look for. Read the help screens before you start.
2. Be as specific as you can.
3. Use Boolean OR to widen your search. Use AND to narrow it. (See below).
4. Don’t use words too general or too common. “And so she says” is reduced to nothing.
5. Don’t use plural forms, always singular
6. Most searchers have an anvanced function. You can use it to further narrow your search.
7. Remember where you’ve been. Write it down in a notebook alphabetically.

Tips:

1. If you don’t know what to use for key words, check an encyclopedia for ideas.
2. Start with a wide search, then begin to narrow it if you get too much.
3. Use other types of searching if the search engines don’t return enough. Try Archie, Veronica, FTP, gopher, etc.
4. Some sites are slower than others due to a variety of reasons. To make them faster, look in options and turn off the graphics. Text loads faster.

Boolean operators - Tools to narrow your search. The most common Boolean operators are AND, which narrows your search to records that contain all terms you enter; OR, which widens your search to include at least one of the terms you enter; and NOT, which excludes the second (and subsequent) terms you enter. For instance:

Search for multiple words: use AND: Looking for documents that contain words for all the colors of the British and American flags. Use red AND white AND blue. This will give back hits that contain all the terms in the record. Use it when you have dissimilar terms and want to narrow the results to a few precise hits. However, be warned that a search for Bob AND Smith could turn up more than just Bob Smith references. It could also turn up anything with the word Bob only and the word Smith only.

Search for concepts with multiple names: OR: When you want to search for terms with several names or variant spellings, like email and e-mail. Use email OR e-mail. This brings up anything that matches one of your terms. This is the default operator for most search engines. It increases your total number of hits, and though you may get some irrelevances, it’s a good operator to use.

Other search terms defined: WILDCARD: Often you’ll see an asterisk (*) as an option. This can stand for any string of characters. For instance: WILD* could return search hits about wildcards, wilder, or wilderness. *CARD could return search hits about wildcards, hardcard, or discard.

String and substring searches: To a database programmer, a string is any series of characters (numbers, letters and spaces). String searches look for exactly the words or phrases you enter, with no leeway for error or spelling mistakes. As long as you get the spelling right, these are the easiest searches to make.

Finding phrases: (I use this a lot - I find it brings up more exact returns.) “emergency room doctor”will return only pages that contain this exact phrase.

You can also combine Boolean queries with a phrase, as in : “may day” AND California. Pages must contain both the phrase and the word California, which could be somewhere else on the page.

For the needle in the haystack: If you are looking for a particular piece of information you can’t fin, you need a spider--or a worm--or a robot. Books have indexes. Your word processor has a command called find. It is impossible to index the Web, simply because it’s too large and changes too rapidly. So, if you can’t find something, you send out an automated software robot that works on your command. Webcrawler is a spider that searches for keywords in all the text in the document. Other spiders are Lycos, Jump Station, Harvest, and Alta Vista.

Usenet: This is a huge collection of discussion groups involving millions of people. Each group has a particular topic and there are thousands of them. Usenet is free. Just about every topic you can think of is the subject of one Usenet group or another. Maybe there is one that would be perfect for information on your next book. Of if not, read the procedures and start one yourself. You can pull up Usenet discussions from certain search engines by just typing in keywords and adding Usenet as one of your selection. You can download most things you need from http://www.tucows.com without worrying about viruses.

Coping with information - or how not to get bogged down in too much: 1. Pace yourself. Huge blocks of information can exhaust you. Only you know how much you can take.
2. Don’t read everything. Skim through to the stuff you want.
3. Don’t print out every page that you might be able to use or save it on your hard drive. Write down the URL if its interesting. Make notes. You can come back to the ones you want after you have seen more.
4. Keep moving. Don’t get bogged down on one page and find yourself reading everything word for word.
5. Don’t follow other interesting links off the subject. You can be gone for hours. Stick to the information you’re looking for.

Here’s how I do information searches:

My next novel is an American historical set in the mid 1800’s prior to the Civil War. It starts in Boston and shifts to St. Louis. There are references to daily living, plus additional information on both cities and also ones in between. Some other research areas include trains, riverboats, Pinkerton agents, slavery, and the underground railway, plus more.

I started with Alta Vista, and typed in the phrase, “St. Louis”. You could definitely call that a wide search, since it returned about 100,000 matches. Then I tried “steam engine” and got 1,000 matches. “Riverboat” (one word) returned 3,000, but “river boat” (two words) got 800 different ones. The term “1850” returned 30,000. “19th century America” brought up a jackpot. It returned 500 matches on everything from What is Victorian furniture to Culture and Consumerism, and the politics of slavery, a Discovery Channel story about quackery and the use of leeches, Wells Faro, and an Old West page on legend and reality of 19th century America west of the Mississippi. And the tremendous list of links on this site alone, will have me collecting information for days.

  Pam Binder  Sandra Bishop Eleanor Jacobs Jill Marie Landis Mimi Latt Sharon Sala

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