Five expert ways to search for information about Ann Arbor

Posted on Mon, Apr 12, 2010 : 10:45 a.m.

Five expert ways to search for information about Ann Arbor

By Edward Vielmetti

If you're searching for things on the Internet, it's worth noting that you can get results far beyond a simple search by zeroing in on some collections that are distinctive. Here are deep links into five sets of deep and ever-changing databases, with examples from the websites for Google Books, Google's historical newspapers, eBay, AnnArbor.com and the City of Ann Arbor.

Google historical newspapers search

New York Times

A terrific local history search is to look through the Google archive of historical newspapers, and reduce the search to a particular decade. This search for "Ann Arbor" from 1880-1899 retrieves articles like this New York Times account of the 1892 visit of ex-President Grover Cleveland to Ann Arbor:

"ANN ARBOR, Mich., Feb. 22 -- This university town was agog to-day over the presence of ex-President Grover Cleveland, ex-Gov. Campbell of Ohio, and other prominent Democrats. Its places of business were profusely decorated and everybody kept holiday. The special train on the Michigan Central Railroad hearing the distinguished party arrived from Detroit at 11:45 A.M."

Google site search, AnnArbor.com

The Google search engine lets you constrain the search to a single site. For instance, if you want to see everything that Google knows about the coverage of FestiFools on AnnArbor.com, run this query:

site:annarbor.com festifools

and you'll get back current results (with video).

Google site search, a2gov.org

A second extremely useful site to know how to search with Google is the City of Ann Arbor's site, a2gov.org. Compare the results between Google

site:a2gov.org argo dam

and the internal search on a2gov.org

argo dam

and notice that as of this writing the Google search returns 187 results, but the city's search returns only 18, and adds this error message:

"Unable to display this Web Part. To troubleshoot the problem, open this Web page in a Windows SharePoint Services-compatible HTML editor such as Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer. If the problem persists, contact your Web server administrator."

Google books search

A terrific source of local history information is Google Books Search, especially if you are looking to search for material from before 1922 or so. Look for examples in aÂ search for full text books about Ann Arbor on Google Books; you'll find things like the full text of the Ann Arbor City Directory, 1890-1891.

eBay

A great source of local historical information is eBay; you can watch memorabilia and local historic items go up for auction, and even if you can't afford to collect all of the things you're interested in, you can at least look at the photos of the items for sale.

The MVictors weblog has an eBay Watch category, where auction items get the full football historical treatment. eBay Watch: Jesse Owens, Gerald Ford and 1934 is a good example of the same, with an image of the 1934 Ohio State-Michigan football game that was up for sale.

A simple Ann Arbor search on eBay returns 436 results as of this writing; if you want to construct more complicated searches, this guide to constructing eBay search results can help you refine something more specific to match your needs.

Edward Vielmetti is looking for something that you haven't seen before. Help him find it at edwardvielmetti@annarbor.com .

Comments

Vivienne Armentrout

Mon, Apr 12, 2010 : 11:28 a.m.

Some extremely useful points, Ed. Does the site search function for a2gov.org work even if the city website is down?