• About
    • About the FIA
    • Priorities
    • Our Team
    • Brainstorming Board
    • Partners and Affiliates
    • Contact Us
  • News + Events
    • News
    • Events
    • Videos
    • Newsletters
    • @FIAumd
    • In the Media
  • Spark Grants
    • Spark Grants Overview
    • Spark Grants FAQ
    • 2012-2015 Seed Grants
    • 2012-2015 Seed Grant Winners
  • Special Topics
    • SearchReSearch
    • Curated Topics
FIA

SearchReSearch

Answer: When you want just the headlines…

Dan Russell • April 12, 2016
 SearchReSearch
Republished with permission from SearchReSearch
Answer: When you want just the headlines… Dan Russell
This was harder than most...

... but everything is a bit harder in the City of Angels, as much hard-boiled detective fiction will bear out.

But there are multiple solutions. Today I'll just write about the simple Google News solution, and then later this week, I'll get around to showing you some other methods. (It's slightly complicated because I'm traveling this week, which is why this Challenge answer is delayed.)

Suppose I'm a reporter trying to understand how the Los Angeles City Council deals with gun-related issues. Can you (expert SearchResearchers) tell me how to do the following?


1. Can you search the major news outlets in the Los Angeles (LA) region for news articles over the past year that report on the City Council considering any kind of gun-related actions? (Be generous here--if the council heard a report about the use of guns, that would count.)
2. (Harder) Can you find the top 100 LA City Council headlines on guns, and then extract the publication dates to create a week-by-week histogram of when these articles were published? (This is a two-step challenge: (a) find and extract the dates, (b) put the dates into a spreadsheet and create a histogram showing the number of publications on this topic by week.)

As I mentioned last week, the problem here is to search JUST on the headlines. How can you do that on Google?


First of all, remember that there IS a Google News service. So what happens if we search for:

[ Los Angeles City Council gun ]

You'll get a fairly unfiltered set of news articles with these words... which aren't very specific. I'd say this isn't a great way to go--it's too open-ended, and the search terms aren't always in the headlines. This is because default News search searches both the headlines and the body text.



The big trick about searching Google News is to realize that there's a hidden dropdown widget in the News search box. See below:



It's only when you roll-over that downward pointing triangle that you realize what it's for:



Ah ha! It's the apparently-missing-and-well-hidden Advanced News Search UI!

If you click on that, you'll get lots of options that would be handy for a Challenge like this:




I've filled out the form to search for city and council and gun within the headlines of the article between the specified dates.

Note that I also added a Location at the bottom--here I put in Los Angeles.

And the results come back:






You might wonder why the 4th article is considered "in" the Los Angeles area. It's because that's where the website, OpposingViews.com is headquarted. The Los Angeles Times and KABC-TV are obviously correct, but the "Location" filter works off of the location of the organization that's writing, rather than the location that's being written about.

(Note that this is one of those things what will get better over time as entity identification improves. For for the moment, we have to live with this as it is.)

Now, if you do this same kind of "headline search" with a different query that returns fewer results, it means you might consider what OTHER papers not-in-the-area might well write about, but be headquartered somewhere else.

So let's run a query for [ county courthouse ]. If you search only in Los Angeles, there are only 5 results. But change the location to "California," and you'll get a superset of all the headlines written about the county courthouse from news organizations within California.

Now we see a LOT more results (around 60):



As you'd expect, there are more slightly off near-hits here. The "Knox County Courthouse..." article is from SFGate (in San Francisco), but it's not about California. We'd have to filter through these results as well, in order to get to the kinds of news stories that we really want.
But at least you've learned a new way to search JUST the headlines of News stories.

However, I have to zoom to the airport just now... I'll answer the question about how to extract the dates and create the histogram tomorrow, along with the Search Lesson.

Stay tuned, and search on!


Share

Comments

This post was republished. Comments can be viewed and shared via the original site.
1 comment

About the Author

Dan RussellDan Russell

I study the way people search and research. I guess that makes me an anthropologist of search. While I work at Google, my blog and G+ posts reflects my own thoughts and not those of my employer. I am FIA's Future-ist in Residence. More »

Recent News

  • Deepfakes and the Future of Facts
    Deepfakes and the Future of FactsSeptember 27, 2019
  • Book cover for Joy of Search by Daniel M. Russell
    The Joy of Search: A Google Insider’s Guide to Going Beyond the BasicsSeptember 26, 2019
  • The Future of Facts in a ‘Post-Truth’ World
    The Future of Facts in a ‘Post-Truth’ WorldMay 15, 2018
  • The Future of Virtual and Augmented Reality and Immersive Storytelling
    The Future of Virtual and Augmented Reality and Immersive StorytellingJune 6, 2017

More »

Upcoming Events

There are no upcoming events scheduled. Please check back later.
Event Archive »
Video Archive »

Join Email List

SearchReSearch

  • SearchResearch Challenge (3/22/23):  What do you call the sediment that blocks a river from flowing to the sea?
    SearchResearch Challenge (3/22/23): What do you call the sediment that blocks a river from flowing to the sea?March 22, 2023
  • Answer: What do these everyday symbols mean?
    Answer: What do these everyday symbols mean?March 15, 2023
  • SearchResearch Challenge (3/8/23): What do these everyday symbols mean?
    SearchResearch Challenge (3/8/23): What do these everyday symbols mean?March 8, 2023
  • PSA:  Read Clive Thompson’s article about how he does research
    PSA: Read Clive Thompson’s article about how he does researchMarch 3, 2023

More »

University of Maryland logo
Robert W. Deutsch Foundation logo
Google logo
Barrie School
Library of Congress logo
State of Maryland logo
National Archives logo
National Geographic Society logo
National Park Service logo
Newseum logo
Sesame Workshop logo
Smithsonian logo
WAMU
© 2023 The Future of Information Alliance, University of Maryland | Privacy Policy | Web Accessibility