Finding The Right Words

For those of us old enough to remember the old index cards in libraries – the hardest part of any research was working out which subject headings to look under.

Google has the same problem. You can find out just about anything IF you know where to look. So what happens if you can not find the information you need but can’t think of another way to phrase it so you can look somewhere else? You can stumble from link to link for ages, or you can look at the modern version of the “see also” area on the index cards. I am talking about tag clouds, a tool that can help show you what others have looked at in the past.

 Tag clouds can help in a number of ways. For those of us that are very visual, they provide a picture of the information that helps sort it by importance at a glance. They can help focus attention, providing a visual to work from. They may also allow you to focus on one particular area and follow that just like using a thesaurus.

There are a variety of tools to help you create and use tag clouds. http://www.deeperweb.com uses a normal Google search and gives you a variety of lists. You can see the words people were looking for and at, the webpages they came from and the areas of the world the words were gathered from. An example from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tag_Clouds_for_Searching_on_Google.png is below.  Each of the words in these lists are clickable so you can drill further down if you want to.

Other tools allow you to create tag clouds from documents, RSS feeds and other webpages. http://www.makecloud.com/index.html is an example. So give it a try and see if it works for you.