Notes on method (2) - Google News alerts

Search engines come in all shapes and sizes and here we simply discuss our experience without fear or favour.

The advent of Google News in Chinese around a year ago was a major breakthrough for research on contemporary China. The PRC media world is an unsanitisable, seething cauldron of fact, analysis and spin. Many emerging issues are discussed without fear or favour, simply because the powers that be haven't had time to determine the party line. Policy issues, social movements, jargon can all be watched in statu nascendi. For someone who started in the era when you applied for funding to travel to Hong Kong to hunker down in the University Services Centre simply to read Mainland newspapers, catching up months or years after the event, this is a brave new world indeed.

As a research tool it has the advantage of being algorithm-based, hence replicable. There are issues of course. Selection of the search terms, filtering the sometimes huge sets of results—but these problems were always there. With good server speeds a search can be tested and refined in real time.

That's simple searching. Also valuable is the ability to post an alert—there is a prompt at the bottom of each Google News page—so that you receive emails listing the results of searching on a given term by the day, week other interval.

I have posted four alerts in recent times. They provide more than enough interesting results to deal with on a daily basis. One of them is on the string 房价新政 fángjià xīnzhèng, "new housing price policy". I'll do a PMT on today's return which has just arrived. It will be in a following post.

But immediately following is an interesting "find"—an article by a researcher with a theory linking three major governance issues: land, the stock market and real estate.