Your First Search and Your Next Searches
Obviously your first search is going to depend on the amount of information you have, as we've discussed in previous principles. For here let's start with Asperger's Syndrome, searched for as a phrase:
"Asperger's Syndrome"
Once you do the search, look at the results on three levels. The first level is the search results, the second level is page characteristics, and the third is page content.
First Level: Search Results
Run your eyes over the first hundred results and see if anything pops out at you. There will be several things you can notice with this first viewing:
Sometimes it's called “Asperger Syndrome.”
It was discovered by Hans Asperger.
It's related to autism.
Tony Attwood is a noted Asperger Syndrome author.
It has its own Yahoo Directory (which tells you that it is not a rare disorder and that there are at least a fair number of resources available).
There are several books available about it (which, again, indicates that it is not a rare or little-known disorder).
TIP
You'll notice that the information you're gathering together is kind of like the information you gathered together when you were exploring the Principle of Unique Language, when you gathered vocabulary unique to your topic and used it to steer your search. It's true; the idea is similar. However, in this case you're going beyond vocabulary and into concepts (like autism) and people (Hans Asperger and Tony Attwood).
Note all this information wherever you want to note it (more on that later). On to the second level.
Second Level: Page Characteristics
Run your eyes over the search results again, this time paying attention to the page title and page URLs. Does anything jump to your attention now?
In many page titles autism and Asperger's are mentioned together.
There are an unusually small number of .com results—most of the results are .edu, .org, or country codes like .uk and .au.
Some of these kinds of scraps you won't notice when you start your observation. It'll take many bouts of research before you recognize an unusual amount of top-level domain results. But gather what you can from here and move on to the third level: page content.
Third Level: Page Content
How far you go—that is, how many pages you review—with the third level is entirely up to you. You may go over ten pages. You may go over fifty. Some people will patiently go over hundreds of results. It depends on how deeply you want to research and how important a thorough answer is for you.
Regardless of how many pages you want to go over, keep an eye out for the following things:
Unique words (a la the Principle of Unique Language).
Names—Are the same ones coming up over and over again? Note people names and organization names.
Dates.
Places and addresses, if they come up more than a couple of times.
Facts associated with your topic. If all widgets are pale green, note that. If all gadgets are exactly 37 centimeters wide because of a European declaration in 1964, note that. Of course you will not know which facts are true and which are not (we'll get into that more in Chapter 13, “The Principle of Salt Grains”), but when you see a fact repeated more than a few times, you'll know it's a pointer to more information about the topic.
You'll notice I didn't mention opinions here. Most of the time opinions are couched in such a way that they're not unique and not searchable. If someone “loves widgets” or “hates widgets,” that doesn't give you much to go on to change your search. If someone “loves widgets because they're light blue” or “hates gizmos because they cost 14 times as much as widgets,” then those might be facts that you can add to your scrap pile.
As you gather scraps, you'll need to organize them in some way. You can organize scraps in your head, but you run the risk of missing something or misremembering something. I find that there are two general ways to organize scraps—via bookmarks or text files.