Maine Newsstand

I am an avid whitewater kayaker and am amazed as to how deaths from whitewater rafting get reported as heart attacks. So, I decided to look up articles on this topic.

My list of keywords was as follows: whitewater, died, death, heart attack, mortality, and accident. I explored all of these combinations, but I had the best results with the combination of "whitewater" and "death." However, the results list included many articles about the Whitewater scandal of 1997. To avoid most of the articles on this topic, I went to advanced search and looked for "whitewater" and "death" not "White House." This list of results was generally on topic, but I was able to "add a row" to my advanced search and include not "Starr." These results were even more on topic. The dates ranged from 1993 to 2012 and were easy to arrange by oldest or newest first using the drop down menu to the right that allows you to sort by relevance and publication date. I liked the use of highlighting, which made it easy to zero in on my keywords, and I really loved the publication date graph. I can see using the publication date graph with students when looking for a quantity of articles on the same topic. For example, if they were looking for the year with the most hunting accidents, this graph could point them in the right direction. By clicking on a section of the graph, you will get your search results for that year only.

I was uncertain about "Tags." My marginal understanding is that they are names attached to something (picture, article) to help organize information. If I attach "whitewater" to pictures and articles, I should be able to search for this tag and get my stuff with the "whitewater" tag. However, I'm not certain how to put tags on things.

RSS feed was another area I didn't know much about. Again, my marginal understanding is that it helps publishers send you information (articles) on a topic that you are interested in and have created a feed on.

When I tried to create an alert, I was stopped by the message: "Server error caused your requested action to fail..." I'm sure this is because I am doing this research at school and our filter is blocking this process.