Circa 2003, while studying policy 'sciences' as a new grad student, I was introduced to the concept of the policy 'muddle'.

Rather than fostering expectations of rational and scientific decision and policy-making, the author and professor were introducing us to the pragmatic, glaring disjuncture between the idealized 'policy process' and the real-world situations that range from successes, through 'muddles', to 'disasters, failures, etc.'

When it came time to be writing up my thesis, the concept had made an impression on me; but my readings were all poorly bound and poorly duplicated (photocopies of photocopies, some with the ends of all the lines on a given page missing!) by SFU's dutiful and dismal Coursework Printing shop. Piles and stacks of Paper.

But I was a digital adept, right? I should be able to find this stuff, no problem.

Armed with my confidence, a phrase muddle through, the domain (policy sciences, or political science) and vague recollections of a few of the 'big names' from my readings, I set off, through Google Scholar and Academic Search Elite...

And found a big fat nothing.

I eventually gave up (lame) and decided to make do with a generalized spitball about the "muddle through" metaphor.

Flash forward about a year to today. I'm in 'search and destoy' mode, in the middle of a massive research & harvest push for my 3 term projects on Text Clustering Visualization.

I was doing some collection sanitizing, seeing if a 'grey literature' article I had in my collection had ever been published (it had not) when I noticed that phrase at the bottom of the screen.

(I like to scroll through the results of a GS full-title search, to see how or if an article has percolated through the peer-reviewed literature.)

(The search that set me off down this rabbit trail...)

The words piqued my interest.

I thought to myself, "Why don't I put this one to bed?" (You see that I am occasionally more challenge-motivated than goal-driven...)

So I clicked on the article. Nothing special. Just some legal reviewers' take on the metaphor.

I select my phrase of interest and through Firefox's right click menu, and select the option Search SFU's Google Scholar (Using my customized search engine script to work with SFU's required off-campus proxy) for these terms again.

Again, nothing.

I decide to add muddle through policy.

Still nothing. Till I notice a familiar name: Lindblom, C. Still Muddling, Not Yet Through.

But this guy sure picked a weird way to put it. In any case, visited JSTOR, downloaded the RIS and then the PDF and TIFF of this article.

Then I decided, given this guy's strange phrasing, to look up muddling.

Bingo. In the back of my mind, I knew this had something to do with 'science' and there it was.

The science of "Muddling Through"

(The search that found my missing capstone)

Only the date was wrong: 2003, when I felt that I knew I was looking for something quite old...I was looking for the grandfather of this metaphor!

A couple more searches for muddling through policy and "muddling through" policy yield or refine not much; so I check out Google Scholar's 'all N versions' link (in this case it was 2) and...

Voila. One of them (2003) is a reprint of a (1959) article that is available to me through JSTOR!

And finally, just down the GS results page I find the article I actually read:

Forester. 1984. Bounded Rationality and the Politics of Muddling Through.

I download them both from JSTOR...

As it turns out; I have 2 books by Forester, and innumerable citations of Lindblom in my collection.

Now, why couldn't I find "muddle through"?

Because I should have been "muddling through".

ADDENDUM: So, what was the point of this little anecdote of "lost and found" woe?

Google Scholar (GS) does not accept wildcard (*) searches.

My original search for muddl* through produced nothing but articles authored by various Muddls.

While a plain old google search of the same terms today yields a 1979 JSTOR article citing Lindblom; two years ago it did not.

So plain old google search, at that point in history, was too broad to for my driftnetting strategy. And GS was (and still is) dependent on precise orthographic and syntactic word-level morphology, or, if you like, requires that you use words exactly as authors use them in order to find documents that you know to exist.

This does not help much if A) you don't know the author's name, B) you don't know the article title, C) you don't remember exactly how the author phrased it.

Some times your muddling just needs a little serendipity to be successful.