Search Well, and Ye Shall Find

Friday, June 18, 2010

Search Quest #1: Find me a good copy of the full works of William Shakespeare

Welcome to the first in our "Search Quest" Series.  In these activities, we will ask you to find us something specific and then you will find it.  Bonus points for creativity, elegance and demonstrating a clear understanding of how to search the internet.

The rules are simple:
  1. We post a topic to find.
  2. You search for it.
  3. You post what you have found AND how you found it as a comment to the original post.  Specifically, what search engine or internet tool you used, what your query was and how effective you think you were in this task.  Obviously, you'll want to include any useful URL's
  4. To the winner go the spoils (what those spoils are, we aren't quite sure just yet--any suggestions?)
Got it?  Good.  If not, maybe you want to go spend some time in our Search School Learning Center.  Here's your first Search Quest Topic:

Search Quest #1:  The Full Works of William Shakespeare

Might as well start off with a classic.  We love books around here.  Luckily for us, there are a lot of books that are freely, legally available on the internet for anyone to view.  These books are in what is referred to as the "public domain".  Essentially, every book written before 1925 (or so) is out of copyright and available for free.

Which brings us to our Search Quest.  See if you can find a copy of the complete works of William Shakespeare (you might have heard of him).  Bonus points if you can find a copy that has the following qualities:
  1. The copy has annotations (notes and references from Shakespeare experts about what is being said).
  2. The copy is a .pdf file. (.pdf files are a pretty common way to share documents on the internet).
  3. The copy has a hyperlinked table of contents (this makes it easy to navigate around the many hundreds of thousands of pages of text).
There you have it.  Good luck.  And don't forget to include your favorite Shakespeare work in your comment!

2 comments:

  1. Here's a site that has all of the Shakespeare works. Not .pdf, though:

    http://shakespeare.mit.edu/

    My query in google was:

    Shakespeare full works

    The site was the first returned result

    ReplyDelete
  2. Not a bad attempt, Horatio. Still, a .pdf would be a great find...

    ReplyDelete