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Mining an Internet Site: Tricks for Locating Information

Data-mining is a skill of extreme importance for the Information Age in which we live. The processes for examining an internet site for ideas and information are a bit different than those used in locating information in a book. There is a table of contents and an index of sort in the links and the search boxes. But, the links often change from page to page, and search boxes make finding specific information easy--if you know the keywords to use. Still, scanning a few pages of a site to get an overview of contents is as useful for researching a topic on the web as it is in scanning a book for locating useful pages. In this essay, I offer a few tricks for scanning a web site to begin the process of locating information and ideas, data-mining. Keep reading.

http://www.epa.gov/owow/oceans/coral/about.html

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Suppose you want to obtain information from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for a report on ecology and environmental topics. Let's examine the topic coral reefs.

This sounds easy, until you get to the site and discover that the actual information that you want is not so simple to locate. There is much information on Coral Reefs at the EPA website, but how to find it?

If you enter Coral Reefs into the search box at the top of the home page, you get a another page with a list of articles-- the first in thousands of articles listed in the EPA database on coral reefs. There are also two sets of breadcrumb links to follow. Each set threads a slightly different path through the website.

Sample Breadcrumb Links
These are usually found in one horizontal line at the top of a page and map the links from a starting point like the home page to the page.
EPA Home > Water > Wetlands, Oceans, & Watersheds > Oceans, Coasts, & Estuaries > Habitat Protection > Coral Reefs > About Coral Reefs

If you follow the breadcrumbs at the top of the page, shown in the table above, you will see that the trail from the home page was through Water, then to Wetlands, Oceans, and Watersheds, then to Coral Reefs, and finally to About Coral Reefs. Backtracking through these links , you will find informative articles, policy papers, maps, diagrams and technical articles all along the way. How do you keep focused on your goal?

Here is a trick. Go to an article in the archives and/or found with a search box that is related to your topic. In this discussion I will use the article About Coral Reefs as an example. The page at the link http://www.epa.gov/owow/oceans/coral/about.html is not the last in the series of pages about coral reefs, but it is obviously a page that would be a great reference for a report on coral reefs. Its links out are also great references for a report. But, each of these pages is informative without being highly technical. Fortunately, these articles will introduce you to the concepts and keywords that you can use to research further using the technical papers. Within the broad statements of the non-technical pages will be themes that you can choose among for providing a focus for your paper. Remember these keywords for search boxes at this site and others, including Google.

Where is the technical information for a more advanced research paper?

Look at the breadcrumb links at the top of the page for About Coral Reefs. Notice that going backwards through the breadcrumb links takes you to broader categories. At each new page, there is a list of more technical articles and links out to more general articles similar to the About Coral Reefs page. Explore these links first by backtracking through the breadcrumbs to see what types of information are available at each level. Then return to the About Coral Reefs page and consider what type of information you will need to add to your report and backtrack to find just that bit of information.

As you explore, you will experience ideas popping into you head about the topic. Copy and paste the link to the page into a note file such as Notepad or Evernote. Add a note about why this page is useful for your report. Write down questions that come to mind that you can use later to organize your report. Continue exploring until you have a good feel for what you want to include in your report. Then use your notes to return to the articles that you want to study and use in your report.

Another rich source of links in most sites, including the above coral reef site, is the education or teacher pages, which often have links to other sites with related information. Often these sites have been screened by the webmaster so that you can count on finding useful information there, not just products for sale.

In summary, I offer these 4 tricks for data-mining.

Trick #1 Get an overview of the topic by mining the breadcrumb links back from an informative article at a government or organization site. This is one technique for locating themes and keywords. In the case of this and other government sites, such mining will locate more technical information.

Trick #2 Use the keywords in search boxes. Now that you have a better idea of the types of information that you want to look up, try entering the words such as coral reef salinity gradient into the search box at the EPA site. Now that you know the kinds of information that is available, use the search box to locate technical data, graphs and maps.

Trick #3 Take notes while you keep searching for more details. Follow the breadcrumb trails that are on the resulting pages. When you find a useful page, bookmark it or copy the link to your Notepad or Evernote file of notes. Jot down a reminder to yourself about the kinds of information to be found on the page alongside the link.

Trick #4 Examine the Kids, Student, Teacher or Education links. Many sites like the EPA or Nature Conservatory offer background articles and links to other sites that offer background information for teachers to learn more about a topic.

Some of the best sites for finding information on a topic are complex, and the amount of information is seemingly overwhelming. Try these tricks to locate just the nuggets of data you need as you mine a site.