Posted on 04/28/2008 9:21:51 AM PDT by Perseverando
Jim Robinson has created and maintains a huge treasure trove of news and information here at FreeRepublic.com. He gladly shares it with us Freepers and the rest of the world (a.k.a. - lurkers). And thanks to Jim and staff, FreeRepublic has a fantastic search engine (far surpassing Google), IMHO, due to the plethora of relevant news and information from around the world posted by us Freepers.
For lack of a better description, I would classify FreeRepublic as a huge historical news and information database thanks to all of the postings and comments of Freepers (and a few disrupters - ZOT!!).
And yes, we believe fervently that our fellow Freepers and anyone else perusing FreeRepublic.com should have the maximum opportunity to read, consider, and discuss with us the information that we dig up from the far corners of the internet. Isn’t that's why we spend so many hours every week "getting out the word" through FreeRepublic.com.
That’s why over the past week, I have spent far too much time reviewing posted articles and adding keywords to them. For example, on recent hot topic subjects, I have found far too many articles on Obama, Wright, and Ayers, with only one or two, or even no keywords associated with the posted article. So when searches are done for articles on these individuals, the search engine misses relevant posted articles.
So please, as you are reading various articles, take a look at the keywords and consider adding some of your own if the poster dropped the ball and failed to list relevant keywords.
So may I humbly suggest and encourage my fellow Freepers to more actively use the available tools - "TOPICS" & "KEYWORDS" to make FreeRepublic more user friendly for those who actively research articles for ourselves and for those who just need "a little more" information on various subjects.
Hey, if we use "KeyWords" when we post, won't it make the FreeRepublic news database even more valuable as a reference source for us, and even those who disagree with us?
Finally, if those who disagree with us visit FreeRepublic because it is known for being the best news database on the internet, maybe they will begin to see the world as it really is.
How about it Freepers?
Yep.
It seems like a lot of older stuff, like so many of the articles about 9/11, are gone into a black hole somewhere. You can find some using Google, however, but not with FR keywords.
Some couldn't find their . . . uh, couldn't find the word 'brain' in a dictionary.
Often what the already-posted nazis (and I'm not saying you're one) mean when they say "I found it" is
-They found an article on the topic, but not the same article posted. The different articles could have different info, but the already-posted nazi only sees the topic.
-Many times the same article but from different sources will have have different titles. Yes, a little more care could prevent double posting in this casr, but it's not the end of the world.
The already posted nazis get on my nerves. Yes sometimes there are too many articles posted on the same topic.
On the other hand, I can't count how many times I have seen the article jumped on the post nazis but never saw the original they referred to. In all those cases, I'm damn glad it was posted twice because otherwise, I wouldn't have seen it at all.
In fact the best informative-type threads on FR rarely get many replies . . . why should you count on luck-of-the-draw in order to see one?
When I want to search FR, I use Google.
Sometimes reality bites.
Ha!
I spend 20 - 60 minutes going over the postings from the night before when I get up at 5:00, Eastern Time. Most mornings, after I get to work and take care of the initial dummy S/W engineers, I take another 30 minutes at about 9:00 to catch up on how the day has started out on the East Coast, and the early doings elsewhere.
I take another 40 - 60 minutes to read FR over lunch, and usually manage 30 minutes during the afternoon.
When I get home at around 6:00 pm, I usually find that I've missed a ton of stuff that happened during the day! Since finding FR in 1998, I've become a terrible news junkie, and I still miss an awful lot of material I'm interested in.
I can go through 8-10 hours (I haven't really counted) of threads in twenty minutes. It takes another 40 to reply to the ones I'm interested in, and then I'm off to the races.
I check Articles when I wake up, around dinner, and before going to bed. Not a perfect system, but it works for me.
By “skim,” I mean that I rarely read the entire thread during the first glance. I will leave a placemarker as a reply a good number of times, that serves as a reminder for me to come back and read the whole thing.
I guess I’m just interested in too many things, and overly curious about what posters have to say.
HEARTILY AGREE!
Count me in, and BTTT.
Surrender to the inevitable.
People will A) fail to check for duplicates, B) post in the “wrong” forum sections, C) misspell titles, D) use the minimum number (one) of topic words, E) use either zero keywords, or the maximum (four) number of useless keywords, and F) post excerpts which consist of the maximum number of words, but drawn only from the beginning of the article instead of hand-excerpting relevant stuff.
:’)
What if the search funtion became part of the posting process. In other words, when a person puts a title in the title field, a search is automatically performed. Also I notice that duplicate posts are sometimes close together in time, so the second poster could not possible have know about the privious post.
The problems for me with just using keywords search are the myriad different definitions of moose, cheese and sister.
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