If you want to be traditionally published, then you most likely want to get a literary agent. To sign with an agent, you need to send them a query letter, but agents can get up to 20,000 query letters a year. With numbers like that, it helps to get in front of agents with every opportunity you have.
We can only query against that which we have collected. And so if someone has never made a ripple in the pond in Syria in a way that would get their identity or their interest reflected in our database, we can query our database until the cows come home, but there will be nothing show up because we have no record of them.
The spirit of science is not to prejudge, but to give any honest query a fair shake.
Even as the Internet has revived hope of a universal library and Google seems to promise an answer to every query, books have remained a dark region in the universe of information. We want books to be as accessible and searchable as the Web. On the other hand, we still want them to be books.
In a lot of these areas, from machine translation to search quality, you're always trying to balance what you can do computationally with each query.
Most of the AI goes into figuring which are the important pages you want. And to some extent what your query means, and what you're likely to be after based on your previous behavior and other information it collects about you.
As for the excellent little wretches who grow up in what they are taught, with never a scruple or a query, ... they signify nothing in the intellectual life of the race.
A query letter should be like a skirt. Long enough to cover everything, but short enough to be exciting.
If an NSA, FBI, CIA, DIA, etc analyst has access to query raw SIGINT databases, they can enter and get results for anything they want. Phone number, email, user id, cell phone handset id (IMEI), and so on - it's all the same.
Why are there no great women artists?' sounds as ignorant of human geography as the query 'Why are there no Eskimo tennis teams?
Query: How does the never to be differ from what never was?
There comes a moment when the things one has written, even a traveler's memories, stand up and demand a justification. They require an explanation. They query, 'Who am I? What is my name? Why am I here?
The causes and severity of NSA infractions vary widely. One in 10 incidents is attributed to a typographical error in which an analyst enters an incorrect query and retrieves data about U.S phone calls or emails.
Writing a good query letter has very little to do with writing a good novel. But if you can't write the one, it makes it really hard to get the other published.
After two years of sending out query letters and failing to get an agent, I made friends with an author, who was nice enough to introduce me to his agent. That got my foot in the door.
Every country has its cocktail-party question. A simple one-sentence query, the answer to which unlocks a motherlode of information about the person you just met.... In Switzerland it is, Where are you from? That is all you need to know about someone.