I would really desperately like to offer Philip K. Dick relevant news on this site in such a way that I don’t need to post it all. I would like it to come in automatically and appear in a feed like I set up on the top right box of the content. Today’s top story is Standing Pat which only includes this part about Philip K. Dick:
“Thus Beattie winds up falling into the trap of conjuring not only Pat Nixon’s interior life but that of her husband — and inserting Richard Nixon into fiction usually yields cringe-inducing results, as works by Gore Vidal and Philip K. Dick, among many others, can attest.”
Not only is this story not primarily about Philip K. Dick, it appears to be insulting his writings. The news feed generally works but the basis of it, is to find stories that mention Philip Dick. We end up seeing stories like this one or The Technological Marvels Microsoft Hides in Its Labs “wouldn’t be out of place in a Philip K. Dick novel” or Sony HMZ-T1 3DTV Headset Review: An Amazing Toy “I’m already living the Philip K. Dick life.” I’m not interested in these three articles and would guess that the site visitors are looking for this either.
The search algorithm I used was to look for Philip Dick in Google News (http://news.google.com). Two questions for the group:
1. Is this acceptable that the news stories may only mention Philip Dick and not be about him.
2. If not, what alternatives would you suggest?
I appreciate all your feedback and will look into any suggestions.
When I have trouble sleeping, usually staying asleep, and get on the Internet to do Philip K. Dick research for my writing about him, I find that the search phrase: “Philip K. Dick” (in quotation marks) with the Boolean logical operator AND (all capitals) then whatever else you might be interested in, say, “C.G. Jung” (in quotation marks) results in some pretty interesting “hits,” especially if you go on to pages 5 and more…
Frank-
Wouldn’t you be missing “Philip Dick” information? That is that I am wrestling with and I don’t see a clear pattern with stories that mention his name in passing and stories that are all about him. Maybe his name in the title would help? Thanks for your input.
Michael,
By putting the search phrase in quotation marks like I indicated, it forces
the search engine to look for that WHOLE phrase, not each individual
word, so I get hits that have PKD in whole or part in conjunction with the
additional subject. Sometimes PKD is in the title, or sometimes within
the text, which is mostly about him, or at least a majority about him.