1.3 Getting the whole story from "the egyptian red book": general  (Page 6/7)

To begin, select the option that searches the entire content of the article just below the text box.

We will be asking the search engine to locate articles that contain all of the keywords that we enter into the text box. By simply entering "Gordon" weare offered 243,551 articles. We would like to cast a wide net, but not that wide. We are going to have to limit our search to get what we are after. Let's look againat "The Egyptian Red Book" to hone our research strategy.

On page 7 we see that the first entry is dated September 1882, the month "Mr. Gladstone's Government invade[d]Egypt." The last entry is dated 26th January, 1885, the day of General Gordon's death. Let us say, then, that the type of story we are looking for would not havebeen published before 1882 and, being a daily paper, not for too many years after the death of Gordon in 1885. We can narrow our search results, then, by restrictingour search to 1880-1890.

We notice on the first page of "The Egyptian Red Book" that Sudan is spelled "Soudan." If that is the common spelling of the region at the time, our search will turn upvery little if we enter today's spelling. "Khartoum," the capital of Sudan, can also be spelled Khartum. We may find more results if we use the spelling preferred by thewriters of the late nineteenth century in searching their daily papers.

Notice that we can either search for all the words together by including the word "and" between each of our keywords, or look for every article that contains at least one of our keywords by entering the word "or" between eachkeyword. We will use "and" to limit our results and make sure that all of our words are in every article. (Most search engines default to "and" if no specificparameters are given.)

Let's begin where "The Egyptian Red Book" begins and look for a Times response to the invasion of Egypt in September 1882. As a keyword, "egypt" alonewill be too broad. We will include the term "mahdi," the person or group the British seem to be going to Egypt to fight. We are offered 934 articles. Notice, however,that we can choose what sort of articles we want to look at.

Our list begins in the 1880's. The first article to jump right out is entitled "Egypt," written in February of 1882.