By now, there are several years worth of journals on the tigoemac.itp.nyu.edu server at ITP, from physical computing, Comm Lab, Social Software, and many other classes. Searching them is a bit of a challenge, however. Here are a few google tips:

add one of these lines to the end of your google search to search all pages on stage:

site:tigoemac.itp.nyu.edu 
site:tigoemac.itp.tsoa.nyu.edu

For example,

LED site:tigoemac.itp.nyu.edu 

would give you everything ITPers on stage have ever written about LEDs.

You can also exclude certain search terms, such as:

LED site:tigoemac.itp.nyu.edu -tigoe

Will give you everything written about LEDs by everyone but tigoe.

All of this applies only to searchable documents, of course, which means HTML, plaintext, text-based PDFs. Flash-based sites are not searched by google (for now; maybe Macromedia will change this in the future).

Keep this in mind when writing journals; it will make life easier for you, your classmates, and future students if your notes are easily readable and searchable, and if they include standard terms on the subject you're writing about. Check other students' journals, and instructors' journals for terms referring to whatever you're writing about. And use a spell checker if you're unsure about spelling. Google will offer suggested corrected spellings, but it won't always find misspelled terms in searches.

Posted by tigoe at October 20, 2004 06:15 AM