I have been giving courses on "Where's the Beef" methods in 4 different countries over the last month. Faced with the tough questions and feedback from participants, I found or realized a few things about searching, which I hadn't thought of before.
If you click on the category Search Engines on this blog, you will see my earlier articles, in which I try to explain the needs of the profession,and , for example, why JBEngine is a good engine.
I have developed a new method in which I combine JBEngine with other good search engines to get a fast impression of a given invention, patent or new technology. The key in the method is to use several INDEPENDENT entry points to Internet, Extranets and Intranets.
For instance, I will use JBEngine together with Kartoo, Edgar and my own Rollyo to understand a new topic. JBEngine would be used to look for market reports and patents, to mention an example. Kartoo would give me an impression of interlinkages between websites (I want pages which DO NOT link to each other), Edgar to see what the US Stock Exchange "thinks" about the topic and Rollyo to see if a technology has been "buried" in the databases of the Rollyo sites.
If the hits from these INDEPENDENT sites give me sufficient information to think well about an opportunity I trust them. This method has the advantage compared to Googling, where one starts with a given search string and then follow the hyperlinks "deeper and deeper" into the web. One problem with this approach is that one has to rely on the quality of the first search string. Another is that the hits are biased by Google or Yahoo's highest ranked pages - and those hits are biased by money and popularity, which are not necessarily what one wishes to use as selection criteria for good hits. That is why INDEPENDENT hits which point in the same direction (good!) are indicators of something worthful, whereas conflicting indications might help one to form new hypotheses about the given topic (ie. reformulate search to test the hypothesis).
Using independent hits gives one feedback which makes it easier to "brainstorm" to refine search strings: for instance, a "controlled release of drugs in a cardiovascular stent" turns out to point to "drug-eluting stent" as the best keyword.
Thinking graphically, the INDEPENDENT search method (we could call it that..) gives one hits at level 1 of many sites, whereas, I see the classical Google search as a method whereby one is guided many levels deep before one finds anything. In the Independent search, one finds possible new search strings at the same level 1, which then guide a dive into level 2 in these independent sites. Chances are that different writers will use different words and form opinions independently of each other. That's good to look through all the useless pages on the web.
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