Research on zwischengas.com - using the Ferrari 250 GTE as an example
Over a million information objects are stored on zwischengas.com, so it's easy to lose track of the forest for the trees. Recently, someone told me that they wanted to search for "Ferrari 250 GTE". Obviously not an easy task.
Entering the three search terms without quotation marks and finesse brings up over 30,000 hits, but it is clear at first glance that not all of them are relevant. For the time being, many pictures are offered and many of them are clearly not a Ferrari 250 GTE, but at least most of them are Ferraris. The zwischengas.com search engine searches for strings of terms with OR, i.e. a hit results if at least one of the terms is found in the document. However, the search engine tries to display hits in order of relevance, but this is not always perfect.
By filtering for technical data, newspaper archive, vehicle articles, technical articles, racing car articles, blog reports and miscellaneous, the number of results can be reduced somewhat.
However, the big breakthrough comes with the AND link. But wait, when we first looked at the results so far, we may have noticed that a Ferrari 250 GTE is not always called that, but also "listens" to the name 250 GT Coupé 2+2. This is a typical problem. Vehicles have often changed names and a vehicle that we now call "Beetle", for example, was once called "1200", "11" or just "De Luxe". So let's try a search with "Ferrari AND 250 AND GT" - this should now only return hits that contain all three of these terms. The result set is indeed reduced, but now also shows racing cars that raced in the "GT" class.
By further optimizing the search query, you will find some relevant articles at the end, e.g. the report from the 1963 Motor Show ( vehicle is called Ferrari 250 GT Coupé 2+2 here) or the article about an engine repair on a Ferrari 250 GT/E.
And of course technical data on the Ferrari 250 GTE can also be found, although here the vehicle is called the Ferrari 250 Gran Turismo Coupé 2+2.
It's a bit like a treasure hunt and the nice thing about it is that you find so many interesting things while searching. But of course there are also many reports or background information that are missing. And that's why the zwischengas.com crew is constantly working on expanding the data archive and making it even easier to search. At the same time, we are working on optimizing the search engine to better meet the needs of our users.
