What Real Time Strategy game must I play?

By: Kai Henriquez

On: November 24, 2009

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About Kai Henriquez

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http://www.twitter.com/kaict

So you like Real Time Strategy games and want to find new games previously unknown to you, but potentially worth playing? The first thing you should do then is look for a list or index of items in the topic. But, what games are worth buying next? How will you choose from this list? The “TELL ME WHAT TO CHOOSE!” method will assist you in doing just that!

After compiling the topic list, you must now make a list of websites containing plenty information on the topic. A simple Google search can give you relevant URLs. Or you could use Technorati to find the top blogs and news sites of specified categories. To easily harvest all the URLs from Google (or URLs from text bodies) follow these steps:

Query Google for your keyword (select 10, 20, 50 or 100 results per page, depending on how many URLs you would like to analyze)
Copy the page source of the site
Paste the copied source into the Harvester
Specify harvesting preferences and harvest
Harvest

Now you have a list of websites (here the URLs I used) that can potentially provide information about the items in your topic list. What the “TELL ME WHAT TO CHOOSE!” method will do is basically check how many times each item in your topic list is found by Google within each URL in your websites list. This is what you do now to start automating advice for your decisions:

Run the Google Scraper tool
Copy the websites list and paste it into the top form. Be sure that every URL is on a separate line.
Copy the topic list and paste it in the bottom form. Be sure that every item is on a separate line and preferably between brackets (e.g. “Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos”)
De-select the “only query discrete sites” checkbox
Name your results file for archiving
Scrape Google

Now you wait till the tool is done scraping. How long it takes will depend on the size of your 2 lists. When finished, the scraping tool provides a nice overview of the amount that the items in your topic list are found within the URLs of your websites list. According to these crowd-sourced / Google-sourced results you can now finally CHOOSE!