Sunday, February 17, 2008

Watch your ASCII when searching for news? I'd seen the story. It was even in The New York Times news quiz on Friday. I saved the exact headline so that I could retrieve the story for my students, should they manage to get the answer wrong on an in-class quiz. To test my classroom-presentation wizardry, I typed that headline --exactly-- into the Times search engine that you can find here: http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?#top Results? A somewhat dated story from January about John Edwards and Rudy Giuliani dropping out of the race (see clip), and a remarkably well preserved Robin Toner "Political Memo" column from last June. Before any conspiracy theorists come up with reasons that the Times liberal hegemony might want to suppress the news of Romney endorsing McCain, I'll kill the suspense, put on my propeller-topped geek-wannabe hat, and point out the little technical problem in the Times search engine. Notice the apostrophe in the headline. It's a "curly quote" or "inverted comma" in the Times's traditional serif font. Curly quotes and elegant apostrophes are not part of the most basic 128 ASCII keyboard control codes, which include the old-fashioned typewriter-style "straight quotes" and the simple up-and-down apostrophe, which is the one I typed into the search field. In the code for the page, that curly apostrophe is represented by an explicit tag in a format Web browsers use to present symbols from more exotic character sets: an ampersand, a pound sign, a character number (in this case, 8217) and a semicolon. In ASCII, a plain old apostrophe or single quote is number 27; in some systems a curly apostrophe is a 92. Neither will retrieve that headline from the Times. The generalized tip for archive-searchers... at least until some wizard search-engine optimizer at the Times gets my memo: It might help to leave out some punctuation marks. Come to think of it, I wonder if any our library database search engines, or Google, or other search systems, have similar glitches. Hmm. (Ironic note: If you saw the word "BASE" in [brackets] before I added the graphic representation of the headline to the earlier version of this post, it's because my somewhat antiquated blog template doesn't like those extended ASCII or ISO character numbers, either, and I've had higher priorities than fixing it. Similar, the whimsical creator of this blogging system included a shortcut that replaces the word curly in quotes with a picture of the member of the Three Stooges named Curly, , which appeared awhile in the middle of one of the paragraphs above. I've moved it here. Be sure to mouse over the picture and click it for an extra treat. Maybe Dave will add a comment to this blog post telling me the history of that innovation... not as significant as his making podcasting possible, but still fun. :-) 12:37:57 PM    comment []

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