Re: st: RE: Finding Stata commands

[Neil Shephard <nshephard@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Oct 4, 2010 at 12:16 PM, Tim <lists@timbp.com> wrote:
> out why. So here's a summary.
> Monitoring Statalist is great for learning what is available (both in terms
> of techniques and in Stata commands). But this is a very active list and I
> only read posts where the title relates to something I am working on. I
> would search the archives if I were trying a new type of analysis. But I
> would not have searched for -psmatch2- and I dispute that "most users" would
> have.
>
> I don't expect Stata or Statalist to give me the best analysis for my
> problem. But if I decide I want to do (for example) propensity weighting, I
> would hope -findit-  would give appropriate results. And I still wonder why
> I have never heard of -psmatch2- when (according to Statalist) most Stata
> users interested in propensity matching would look for -psmatch2-.
>

Looks like part of your message was truncated.

However, you don't need to know the existence of -psmatch2- as a
user-written module for Stata (or any other name that a user has given
their command) in advance of searching for it as the following link
demonstrates....

Propensity matching --> http://tinyurl.com/36ohbso
Propensity weighting --> http://tinyurl.com/2ejmo5r

..the results of which hint at -psmatch- and various other results.

Google (and others Microsoft with Bing, Yahoo!) invest a lot of time
and money in developing search algorithms for their sites.  I would
rather see Stata Corp. spend their efforts on developing data
management and statistical routines than improving the search
algorithm, particularly when the tools that already exist can be used
to great effect to find what you are looking for within the relatively
small Stata-sphere.

As Nick pointed out this does hinge on the authors guessing at the the
likely keywords that others would use to search for.  In general there
would be a common thread to terms people would use when looking for
something.

Neil

(Links are in jest by the way)


-- 
"Our civilization would be pitifully immature without the intellectual
revolution led by Darwin" - Motoo Kimura, The Neutral Theory of
Molecular Evolution

Email - nshephard@gmail.com
Website - http://slack.ser.man.ac.uk/
Photos - http://www.flickr.com/photos/slackline/

*
*   For searches and help try:
*   http://www.stata.com/help.cgi?search
*   http://www.stata.com/support/statalist/faq
*   http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/stata/