Throughout our professional career as architects, engineers, urban planners, etc. we will have to search on the Internet about documentation (books, PDFs, presentations, etc) to carry out work or simply as a consultation.
The results obtained on the Internet for some searches determined do not always provide us with the information that we want, and, to be honest, we can spend a few hours seeing pages where we will not get anywhere or full of «spam» (See article how to find books on architecture).
The other day, talking to a fellow computer scientist, we commented that Google allows you to create a search engine personalized to obtain better information quality if you know some programming. Right away we thought we needed a search engine specialized in the sector of architecture, works, engineering, design urbanism, etc. but that only will provide documentation.
To understand the free tool that we have created and that exclusively provides documentation we can see the following image:
From here we began to work to create a tool in search engine format that first, was completely free, and, secondly, that only provide us with documentation related to the architecture, engineering, works , etc.
Content menu:
Actually, it works similar to a typical Google search engine. where we will introduce a term "X" and it throws us a series of results. In order for us to understand it schematically, we have created the following infographic:
The tool works with any language. Once I know enter a term, results can be filtered by type of documents (PDF, Word, Excel, etc) and by relevance or by date that has been entered on the Internet.
First of all, we must understand that the search engine filters the information we find on the Internet when we search for a term "X" in the Google search engine.
Although there are hundreds of different files that tag to documents. We have debugged the most common and that we use all type files: .txt, .csv, .pdf, .ppt, .ppx, .pptx, .xls, .xml, .xlsx, .xltm, .doc, .docm, .docx .
In addition, we have included two web portals that host in their servers millions of documents, the ISSUU platform and Slideshare , with the peculiarity that they are accessible free and we do not need to register to see all the documentation. In the tool we will see several tabs and they are:
We remember that in this article we saw how to find theses doctoral studies in any field and from organizations or universities worldwide.
Although obviously it will depend on the term or phrase of search, of the information hosted on Google servers and the file type, there is a point to be understood.
We have to consider that, for it to be a free search engine, we do not use what is called the "Google API" nor the Google Scholar for its restrictions. But for each term search we will have 10 pages with 20 results that will be individual for each category (There are 6 categories). So the maximum number of documents for a term will be 200 Documents by category , which, if we look and multiply by the individual categories, we would have a total of 1,200 consultation documents per term of search Crazy!
When this search engine is created within the platform of Google we indicate keywords to the search engine. The keywords describe the content or topic of the search engine search and are used to adjust the results on specific themes.
We have included many terms related to the theme of construction, architecture, works, engineering, industrial themes, design or urbanism themes . To give an example, only for the term architecture and its related topics:
Although in the search engine you can carry out searches not related to the aforementioned topics, in Actually, the tool is not prepared to offer quality information in other common sectors.
Another issue that we must understand is the results with which files referring to the tabs – categories of: DOC (Word), Excel and Presentations (Power Point).
By the type of files they are (.doc, .docm, .docx, .xls, .xml, .xlsx, .xltm, .ppt, .ppx, .pptx) and how it behaves when upload them to a website, in 80% of the cases they are and produce direct downloads by clicking on the result (This also happens with a normal Google search), unlike the PDF (which are hosted on websites and we will see them from the website itself where is hosted).
We also have to comment that for the categories of the Excel and Presentations (Power Point) we are not always going to find as many results as in the other tabs.
You can find it from the search tool Specify documents from HERE. Soon we will add it in the HOME of the Home Repair Care portal to make it more accessible for everyone.
With this tool we do not invent anything new, but we believe which can be very useful for those people who want filter documents in a suitable way and find valid documentation without spending too much time "diving" in internet.
