Introduction

• Dialog is a service that has aways existed to make money, even more so as an operation of the very bottom-line-oriented Thomson Corp.
• A database utility such as Dialog also costs a lot to operate. See the "Why Everything Costs So Much" link to get an understanding of that.
• The bottom line, though, for the searcher, for the organization that selects to search Dialog databases, is that it cant be very (even very, very, very) expensive to search, particularly if the search is not well designed or mistakes are made.
  • Two Brief Horror Stories (not by Clive Barker or Stephen King)
    • At a giant corporate law firm that a friend used to work at, the law library had a contract with Dialog that covered upwards of a million dollars of searching a month. A client whose company was looking to establish a manufacturing relationship with a Japanese company needed to know the financials of candidate companies in Japan. Apparently, the person who did the searching made too broad a search on the industry, downloading about 1200 records at over $60 each.
    • A student in this school sometime back was not clear on what they were doing and did a search that used up tens of thousands of our allowance from Dialog.

So,

• It can be very expensive to search, display, and print records on Dialog.
• But, there are some commands that you can use that will track, control and, even, reduce your searching costs.
• These can be used on any of the interfaces to Dialog.

BE SURE TO USE:

• THESE COMMANDS ALL THE TIME WHILE YOU SEARCH.
• THESE COMMANDS in conjunction with the "cost" command, so that you can track your costs on an ongoing basis.

Commands

COMMAND	USAGE	NOTES
help rates	help rates <file number>	help rates 415 To find database rates
cost	cost	Checks costs during a search. Be sure to use periodically to assess the costs of your searching as you are doing it.
pause	pause	You can put your searching on one or more databases on hold for up to 10 minutes. But, only use pause if you are going to be doing something database-related for NO LONGER THAN A FEW SECONDS. This eliminates that database connect charges for the period of the pause, BUT pause has its own charge. Basic Dialog connect charges still run on, so this is not as useful as
logoff, disc, off, bye, quit, stop	logout	Exits you out of Dialog. Use this if you are going to be doing something database-related for LONGER THAN A FEW SECONDS. How much your search costs were will be displayed.
logoff hold (also: off hold, bye hold, etc.)	logoff hold	Also exits you, but keeps the your search results or "sets" for 30 minutes. Within this period, you can reconnect to your search. Log on through exactly the same connection (computer and connection) used in the previous session. Enter your same Dialog user number and password. You should receive the message reconnected rather than logon plus a confirmation of the file to which you have been reconnected. Enter the ds (display sets) command, which should display the sets created prior to your logoff hold command. You can, then, resume your search.
save temp	save temp myfile2	Saves a search for 7 days. Save it as a 1-6 character name. Eg: save temp myfil2 Can be executed later with the exs command Eg: exs myfil2