This page contains a Flash digital edition of a book.
DR CHAPTER 01 31/8/06 16:44 Page 3
suitable search engine(s) on which to perform your One point to bear in mind - especially if you are
searches. getting very few hits - is that words may be mis-
spelled (or use an old spelling) in the text or written
Ask Jeeves (www.ask.com) allows you to type in a in a variety of ways. For instance, if you were looking
question and performs searches, which try and for a place normally written Wickham Market, it could
answer your question. conceivably also be written: Wickham-Market, Wick-
hamarket or Wickhammarket.
As a real example, I needed to find historical
Making the Search
information on a country house in Kent called Hock-
ley Sole. I searched on Google and Dogpile for
“Hockley Sole”and both came up with similar infor-
Keywords should be neither too general nor too mation. Searching Ask Jeeves with the question:
specific. Let’s say we are searching for the history of What is the history of Hockley Sole? Produced no
Kent on Google. There are two buttons on Google, meaningful results. Google and Dogpile both
which allow you to select the whole web or UK sites. returned an online index to Bygone Kent, a local his-
If we just type in Kent for a whole web search then we tory magazine. A four-page article on Hockley Sole
get 6.77 million pages, which will take a lifetime to was listed, which I could have copied at my local
sort through and will include subjects such as Clark library, but instead I emailed the publisher for avail-
Kent and Alexander Kent as well as most topics on ability and price and was able to obtain a back copy of
places called Kent, not just specific to England. the entire magazine containing the article.
Selecting the UK sites button reduces the pages to
1.31 million but still far too many to try and sort Not all searches will get results. Keep trying but
through. We can keep adding new or alternative key- don’t waste a lot of time, as the information may not
words to make the pages returned more specific to be there. It may appear later as new sites and pages
what we are looking for as shown in the chart below. are added. A monthly check could prove worthwhile.
Project Gutenberg
www.archive.org/details/gutenberg.php
Keywords Whole UK
Project Gutenberg has been busily putting out of
Web Sites
copyright texts online for a number of years, which you
can download for free. Listed under the subject: Great
Kent County 1.74M 326000
Britain, are a number of historical texts which could
prove very useful: The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, (circa
Kent County UK 615000 330000
415-1066); parts of Daniel Defoe’s Tour Through The
Whole Island of Great Britain, (1724-6); History of
History Kent County UK 156000 75700
England, (circa 1850); History of the Britons, (796);
On the Ruin of Briton, (circa 516-570)
Roman History 19400 7070
Kent County UK
Find in Top Window (Ctrl F)
This is a very useful tool for locating keywords in
Roman History 37000 12500
pages of text. I once had to locate one sentence in a
Canterbury UK
long Dicken’s novel. I achieved this in about 10 min-
utes by using the free text off project Gutenberg with
the Find in Top Window facility. Hold down Ctrl and
type F or left mouse click on Edit on the toolbar then
In practice, search engines list in order of most rel- left mouse click on Find. A window will pop up in
evance so you will probably find what you’re looking which you can enter the word(s) you are looking for,
for within the first few pages of the list. You can also then left mouse click on the find button.You will find
“search within results”and put different keywords in a number of options under the “more”button to fur-
the search, which will return only pages containing ther tailor your search if required.
your new keywords from the pages already returned
on the previous keyword search. Popular Archaeology
http://www.digital-documents.co.uk
Another way of narrowing down the search is to These are the web pages of the Archaeological
put two or more keywords in double quotes - “Roman Resource Collection whose aim is to make archaeo-
Canterbury”for example. The search engine will only logical and historical information available on the net.
return pages with Roman Canterbury next to each The most useful part of the site is ARCHI, The
other in the text and in that order. Archaeological Sites Index, a fully-searchable
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