“What’s the most information you can get from the smallest query?” is a question adjacent to “How do you ask for what you don’t know?” and another one of my favorite mental chew toys. If you only have the slightest bit of information — a name, a topic — how do you turn that into better understanding?
Offline, the answer to that question would probably be a library. Online, the answer is probably Wikipedia. But once you finish reading a Wikipedia article, how do you go further in your research? You can use what you learned to build better search engine queries, but the process of breaking down a Wikipedia article into effective Google queries would be an extensive one.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could take a Wikipedia article, break it down by headings, do a word-frequency analysis on each block of text, and then click and toggle the most frequent/unusual words into a search box to build Google queries for that topic?
Well guess what!
Wiki-Guided Google Search II
The original Wiki-Guided Google Search used mention counts across Wikipedia to find topics which make meaningful search pairs. WGGS II sticks with one Wikipedia article and breaks it down into headings and words under headings. I need to work on the stop words a bit more, but I really like how WGGS II helps me contextualize my topical searching!
In the screenshot above I’ve analyzed the Agrivoltaics page. On the left you’ll see a menu called “Jump to Section” which lists all the headings. As you scroll down, the search query box goes with you. Click on a search term to add it to the search box.
Once you’ve built your web search by clicking keywords (I learn about solar grazing) click on the “Search Google” button and away you go!
I had to scroll up a bit because this search brought up a carousel of video search results. But past that I like the results I got — grazing, livestock, and solar energy.
If you want to do topical searching online, but you want to start with a certain contextual slant (or even if you just want to browse potential contextual slants), fire up Wiki-Guided Google Search II. Like the rest of Search Tweaks, it is free to use and free of ads. Enjoy.
