Saturday, April 11, 2009

Challenge #5 - Newspapers Online

1. I searched for "West Creek". An "all text" search gave me 7,388 hits. Many hits were from Tennessee, colorado, and New Jersey. The oldest hits go back to the mid-1980's. Limiting to lead paragraph cut my results down to over 1,000, but I still got a lot of hits from outside New Jersey. "Headline" got me down to 200 hits, 1/2 from NJ and 1/2 from Tennessee, for the most part.



2. I searched for the name "Roden Lightbody". It's a pretty unique name, so all but one of my results are from New Jersey. Next I tried "William Polhemus" and got 163 hits, with the lion's share in NJ. I guess some people in Ocean county have very unique names! Searching for "Elaine McConnell" got me 666 hits, with most from the District of Columbia. Adding the word Ocean cut out almost all of the DC results.



3. I searched for one of my favorite authors, Richard Russo. there were man, many hits becasue this is a common name, so I limited the search to the state of Maine and got much better results.

4. I got an error message when I tried this search. Perhaps this is a problem that cropped up since the Polaris migration?

5. Okay, I was able to find and send an article.

6. Most of the searches that come to mind are rather sad - obituaries are most frequently requested. Next, I would have to say is car accidents and third, crimes.

No comments: