Search....

I found Badke's chapters on searching (both keyword and metadata) most interesting. I am fairly familiar with keyword searches (especially google). I did learn from the keyword search chapter, however, about using an asterisks to include all ending of the word. I will definitely use that in my future searches.

The chapter on metadata entered into new territory for me. I found Badke's analogy of the supermarket to be a little confusing at first, but when I actually thought about it I really began to understand it. A supermarket is organized by aisles with different products (i.e. breakfast foods, produce, etc). In those aisles you have products (i.e. chicken soup) and those products have different brands. If you take away all those things, the aisle titles, the product names, and the brands all you are left with is the ingredients which is not very helpful. Metadata is like the supermarket having different fields. So when you are searching for Cambell's tomato soup you do can go straight to the soup aisle and easily find. Same with if you are searching for a specific book title you do not get every book with those words which you searched for.

This makes a lot of sense to me. I have had this problem with google before where I am looking for a specific book and I get a lot of random stuff that I do not want. Getting these extra results takes up time and frustrate me. Metadata makes much more sense.