Web Search Logs

I have been offered the data leader position in my building and decided that I wanted to start to put together something for the beginning of the year and thought this would be as good a time as any to begin to get my thoughts down and the research begun on the message I want to send. So I decided to try the web searching log activity to see how I like the author’s process in comparison to the way I have done things in the past.


I have used a similar process for my own searching in the past, where I keep an electronic log as I go of what I find that is useful and the process of discovering what I need. Mine is not completed in a table, although it should have been; I just recorded links and any thoughts or notes. I never had thought of keeping track of the search terms that I used as I morphed through the thinking process and I found that to be really helpful. I might include more commentary in my log than the author’s original example, because that is more helpful to me to combine the information all into one place and see my thought process at the time when I return later to the project. I am a one engine girl, and almost exclusively use google, I am most frequently annoyed with results from other engines, so the engine check boxes seemed superfluous, although it might be helpful to me to have a date in that box, because if my thinking changes over a long term project/search it might be nice to see when those changes happened to understand the evolution of the ideas. It would also help to find broken links in later years if I needed to use wayback to find an older page that had been changed or was relocated. One other item that I find helpful is, every research log I create has “rsch” in the title so I can find them later if I need to.
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