Search On the Internet

There’s two ways that you can do search.

• Keyword
• The other way … this doesn’t really have a name … directed search maybe … following the links … I have heard of similar things being called “following bread crumbs” or “drilling down”.

If you know what you want, keyword search works very well. If you don’t know what you want, it can also work very well. And it’s fast. But maybe not very accurate, and certainly lacking in quality control.

But if you know a little bit about something, the other kind of search often works best. It also works best if you’re aware that keyword search will get you volume rather than quality, and you’re willing to poke around until you find just what you need.

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This came up in class in the context of finding government spending numbers in GDP.

• You need to know where to go. A keyword search for “USA GDP” will get you to the BEA. But you have to know that this is the place that collects and publishes that data.
• Once you’re on the BEA site, you run into the problem that sites increasingly want you to use their tools to drill down for what you want. In the case of the BEA, you have to go through the Data menu at the top, then through one of the links on the left, which in turn opens up sub-links to the right. In class,
• I went through Data, then clicked GDP on the left and then again on the right.
• The next issue that you come up with is separating press releases and reports from the actual numbers. Sometimes you want a report; these are usually PDF, HTML, or DOCX files. Sometimes you want data, and this is usually in Excel/XLSX format or CSV. In class I clicked on “Tables Only” because it said it has stuff in Excel. When you choose that, a file downloads.
• Except that now you’re in the position of having to drill down some more in that Excel workbook.
• Now you have to think about whether you want nominal or real, dollars vs growth rates, and so on.

Or, you could back up. Instead of clicking Data in the third bullet, you could

• Click tools
• Click interactive data
• Click GDP & Personal Income
• Click “Begin using the data”
• Then choose the Section you’re interested in
• For example, I might choose “Domestic Product and Income”
• When you follow this route, you get to numbered tables. Table 1.1.5 is the short form of what I showed in class.

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Obviously, this isn’t complete, and maybe it never can be. I think maybe the important part is that everyone uses keyword search, but maybe we need to understand better that it works best at the two extremes, but not so well in the middle.