Google Hacks 2Nd Edition [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Hack 11. Search Article Archives

Google serves as a handy searchable archive for
back issues of online publications .

Not all sites have their

own search engines, and even
the ones that do are sometimes difficult to use. Complicated or
incomplete search engines are more pain than gain when attempting to
search through archives of published articles. If you follow a couple
of rules, Google is handy for finding back issues of published
resources.

The trick is to use a common phrase to find the information
you're looking for. Let's use
The New York Times as an example.

1.23.1. Articles from the NYT

Your first intuition when searching for previously published articles
from published on . What it
won't find is all the articles produced by
The New York Times but republished elsewhere.

While doing research, keep credibility firmly in mind. If you're doing casual research, maybe you don't need to double-check a story to make sure that it actually comes from The New York Times , but if you're researching a term paper, double-check the veracity of every article you find that isn't actually on The New York Times site.

What you actually want is a clear identifier, no matter the site of
origin, that an article comes from The New York
Times . Copyright disclaimers are perfect for the job. A
New York Times copyright notice typically reads:

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company Of course, this would only find articles from 2004. A simple
workaround is to replace the year with a Google full-word wildcard
["Full-Word Wildcards" earlier in
this chapter]:

Copyright * The New York Times Company Let's try that George Bush search again, this time
using the snippet of copyright disclaimer instead of the
site: restriction:

"Copyright * The New York Times Company" "George Bush" At the time of this writing, you get over six times as many results
for this search as for the earlier attempt.

1.23.2. Magazine Articles

Copyright disclaimers are also useful for finding magazine articles.
For example, Scientific
American 's typical copyright disclaimer
looks like this:

Scientific American, Inc. All rights reserved.

(The date appears before the disclaimer, so I just dropped it to
avoid having to bother with wildcards.) Using that disclaimer as a quote-delimited phrase along with a search
wordhologram, for exampleyields the
Google query:

hologram "Scientific American, Inc. All rights reserved." At the time of this writing, you'll get 31 results,
which seems like a small number for a general query like
hologram. When you get fewer results than
you'd expect, fall back on using the
site: syntax to go back to the originating site
itself.

hologram site:sciam.com In this example, you'll find several results that
you can grab from Google's cache but are no longer
available on the Scientific American site.

Most publications that I've come across have some
kind of common text string that you can use when searching Google for
its archives. Usually it's a copyright disclaimer
and most often it's at the bottom of a page. Use
Google to search for that string and whatever query words
you're interested in, and if that
doesn't work, fall back on searching for the query
string and domain name.