Answer: How can you find search phrases beyond your own brain's power to imagine?

 Expanding your thoughts... 

The "Walkie Talkie" building in central London has a giant unanticipated consequence. At certain times of day, the windows reflect the sun's rays to a point creating a hot spot that can damage cars unlucky enough to be parked at the focus.

  ... is a key step for doing SearchResearch research.

1. What can a researcher do to find other words and phrases that would help in doing online searching for such a topic?  Let's consider my topic--unanticipated consequences--how can we find other helpful search terms and phrases to seek out and understand this topic?  Ideas?  

Note that what we're looking for are other ways to say "unanticipated consequences." While getting synonyms for each of these two words isn't a bad idea (unanticipated = unexpected, surprise, etc. while consequences = effects, results, etc.), you'll miss a bunch of equivalent phrases or terms. From my own reading in the area I knew that phrases like "cobra effect" or "perverse outcomes" were equivalent, but my brain doesn't answer questions like "tell me all of the other terms and phrases" for this idea.

You could do the obvious synonym search with a search engine.

The Challenge this week was to imagine that you're doing research on a topic that's big, complicated, and difficult to render in just a few words.  How do you start to search for such a beast? How do you expand your mind (and search behavior) to other phrases, terms, and ideas? That is, you could do this (note that you need to use double quotes, or you'll get synonyms for "unexpected"):

It's interesting that Google is giving me synonyms for "unforeseen consequences."  I guess that's the same as "unanticipated consequences," but it's a bit odd.  

If I try Bing, I get this, which isn't quite as useful: 

EXCEPT that in the lower right corner, there's a contribution from CoPilot (i.e., ChatGPT4) suggesting that I try "boomerang effect," "collateral damage," or "Dutch disease." (I hadn't heard of Dutch disease before, so that was a new one to me--it means an apparent causal relationship between the increase in the development of a specific sector (for example natural resources) and a decline in other sectors (like the manufacturing sector or agriculture).)  

But I thought this might be a great chance to try out LLMs as a way to get suggestions about equivalent phrases--that is, after all, what they're really good at doing.  

So I prompted each of the top 5 LLMs for [give me a list of the top ten terms or words that mean the same thing as "unanticipated consequences"].  Here's the spreadsheet with the results, which looks like this: 

You can see a pretty good suite of options here, including several that I hadn't thought about ("unforeseeable repurcussion" or "collateral impacts").  

But we had a great set of suggestions from SRS Regular Readers: 

remmij: 

type in "unintended" and let the suggestions populate.

Here's what I get when I follow remmij's strategy.  It's not a bad way to start.  

From Arthur Weiss:  

Now we can use ChatGPT and similar tools. So I put in this prompt: [I'm trying to find books on the topic of "unanticipated consequences". What synonyms should i use in searching for this topic?] 

(Arthur generates the same list I show above.)  

You can combine these with broader concepts such as "policy," "technology," "social change," "economics," or "decision-making" to refine your search further.

I thought it odd that "black swan" wasn't listed so I asked again. (It's useful to have some ideas to back up what the AI gives you).

"Black Swan" is indeed a relevant term when exploring the topic of unanticipated consequences, especially in the context of rare, high-impact events that are difficult to predict. Here are some additional related terms that might be useful:  Black Swan events, Chaos theory, Butterfly effect, Emergent phenomena, Systemic risk, Tipping points, Complexity theory, Cascading failures, Disruptive events, Unknown unknowns, Contingency theory, Rare events, Outliers, Wild cards (used in futures studies), High-impact low-probability (HILP) events

UC Librarian Donald Barclay wrote:  

My go-to for this is to turn to the experts and try to figure out what language they use. In the case of unanticipated consequences, I might search the term in PsycInfo ($) to see if psychology has anything to say on the topic. I might also search the phrase in Social Science Abstracts ($) and/or in an engineering database like Compendex’s “Engineering Village.” ($)  If I find that experts in a field use different, possibly more precise, language to describe what I’m researching, I can then search those terms. An obvious example is that non-experts commonly drop the phrase “split personality” to describe a certain kind of mental illness. Psychologists, on the other hand, use phrases like “disassociative identity disorder” to more accurately describe the phenomenon commonly, but incorrectly, known as “split personality.” By searching the term used by the experts, I’m more likely to encounter information created by experts and less likely to encounter information created by someone who has watched too many episodes of Dr. Phil.

Searching “unintended consequences” in PsycInfo got 340 hits, so I will need to refine that search to make it useful. It does happen that, as an unintended consequence, the first hit in PsycInfo told me about a book I do not know but which seems promising, Good Intentions: Max Weber and the Paradox of Unintended Consequences. Looking at the full record for that first hit, I was treated to some PsycInfo subject terms that might lead me in fruitful directions if I combine them with “unintended consequences.” These are: Choice Behavior (major); Intention (major); Social Processes (major); Analysis; Consequence

Pro tip: When you find a promising article in a database, always look at the subject terms that have been assigned to it.

Krossbow:  

Suggested using PowerThesaurus to find wide-ranging synonyms.   (Dan: This is a great tool that I'd totally forgotten about!)   

 

Here's what it gave me:  unintended consequences, unforeseen consequences, unforeseen effects, their indiscriminate effects, uncontrolled effects, accidental consequences, accidental effects, accidental results, inadvertent consequences, inadvertent effects, incidental effects, unanticipated effects, unanticipated outcomes, unanticipated results, undesirable effects, undesirable outcomes, undesirable reactions, undesirable results, undesired effects, undesired outcomes, undesired reactions, undesired results.  

RB: 

Built Wiki-Guided Google Search (a kind of front end to do effective Google searches over the Wikipedia). That site contains: Wiki-Guided Google Search, which searches on Wikipedia articles to find concepts related to the ones you're searching. When RB tried searching for "unintended consequences," he got query word recommendations which were both specific (North American Free Trade Agreement, Eliza Armstrong case) and conceptual (Perverse incentive, Structural functionalism).

The second tool on that site is Clumpy Bounce Topic Search. It determines what Wikipedia categories a relevant page belongs to, determines the most popular pages in that category, and makes the ten most popular pages available. This time when RB searched for unintended consequences, he discovered the category "Consequentialism" and generated a search containing the terms unintended consequences, "Consequentialism", and "Experience machine", which dropped him deep in to the wilds of philosophy search results.

2. Same question, except this time I want to search for books on the topic of unanticipated consequences.  (Yes, I know I can go to Amazon, Barnes and Noble, AbeBooks, Google Books, or the Internet Archive.)  What's the best way to find the top 10 books on the topic? 

Unsurprisingly, many of the same tricks that worked above also work here.

When I did the cross-comparision of LLMs suggestions for books, I found this:

which was a pretty decent selection.

Donald Barclay wrote:

As for the books part of your question, you can always resort to not just looking at reviews, but considering where a book has been reviewed to get some idea of how it is regarded. Has the book been reviewed in important journals for the field it covers? Has it been reviewed in outlets like the NY Review of Books, the NY Times, the Times, etc.? On the other hand, metrics like “New York Times bestseller” are worthless because it’s beyond simple for publishers to manipulate bestseller lists. You can also look up a book title in a source such as Google Scholar to see how many times it has been cited. A lot of citations is not necessarily an endorsement, but at least it shows you how much attention has been paid to the book. Google Scholar will also direct you to book reviews that might not turn up in Amazon.  

remmij also suggested going to YouTube and searching there for our topic. I've done this before, and I'm glad remmij brought this up. The results are surprisingly rich and worth reading:

SearchResearch Lessons

There are so many here... but here's a quick summary:

1. Try synonym search. Seems obvious, but you'll find a few great ideas.

2. Try using a thesaurus. Krossbow recommends PowerThesaurus, and I see why.

3. Use LLMs and ask for new synonymous phrases. It works surprisingly well, especially if you compare and contrast different LLMs. (Check out my spreadsheet.) This is an especially good use for LLMs in SearchResearch tasks.

4. Check out Wiki-Guided Google Search as another way to look at Wikipedia.  

5. Don't forget about searching on YouTube. There's more there than you might expect.    

Keep searching. 

SearchResearch Challenge (8/28/24): How can you find search phrases beyond your own brain's power to imagine?

 A real challenge... 

The "Walkie Talkie" building in central London has a giant unanticipated consequence. At certain times of day, the windows reflect the sun's rays to a point creating a hot spot that can damage cars unlucky enough to be parked at the focus.

  ... for doing online research (what we call SRS) is figuring out what to use for the search terms and phrases.

For most people and for most research questions, figuring out what search terms to use is not a huge problem--in truth, people mostly look up fairly simple things.  (What's the phone number of my local pharmacy?  When is the swimming pool open?  Is there a grocery store near me?)  The vast majority of online searches are like that--straightforward requests for information.  

But then every so often you land in a really difficult research swamp, and it's tough to figure out how other people would write about the very concepts you're interested in learning about. 

As you no doubt know by now, I'm working on a new book about Unanticipated Consequences (see my earlier post about this).  And even though I'm a full couple of years into the project, I find myself STILL trying to figure out how to find books, articles, web pages, podcasts, news stories (etc.) on the topic. 

That's why today's SRS Challenge is all about how to deal with this kind of problem.  

Suppose you're doing research on a topic that's big, complicated, and difficult to render in just a few words.  How do you start to search for such a beast? More particularly: 

1. What can a researcher do to find other words and phrases that would help in doing online searching for such a topic?  Let's consider my topic--unanticipated consequences--how can we find other helpful search terms and phrases to seek out and understand this topic?  Ideas?  

2. Same question, except this time I want to search for books on the topic of unanticipated consequences.  (Yes, I know I can go to Amazon, Barnes and Noble, AbeBooks, Google Books, or the Internet Archive.)  What's the best way to find the top 10 books on the topic? 

Note that we want to learn HOW you'd find such search terms or books.  What process did you follow to come up with search terms that work for your last big, complex, and tricky search?  

Tell us in the comments! 

Keep searching. 

Answer: Finding the earliest aerial photo in your area?

 Photos from the heavens... 

Early aerial photo by Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, aka Nadar, from a hot air balloon.
Near Montmartre, Paris, 1866. P/C Wikimedia.

 In my searches this week I found, as Howard Carter said when peering into Tut's tomb for the first time, "... I see marvelous things," including this shot of the pyramids at Giza, photographed from Eduard Spelterini's balloon on November 21, 1904.  

Giza Pyramid complex. Eduard Spelterini, 1904.  Wikimedia.  

This is a great example of kinds of EARLY pix were were seeking.  Recall that your Challenge this week was to... 

1. What's the best way to find the earliest possible aerial photos taken of some area?  As we work on this, tell us how you found the earliest aerial images of the place where you live (Vancouver Island, Mexico City, Portugal, Rio de Janeiro, etc.)  

It's one thing to find an image... but more importantly: What lessons should we learn about finding aerial photos?  IS there a general method for finding historic aerial imagery?  Or does every place have it's own special and particular story?  

Once again, I spent way too much time on this.  (There's something about archival imagery that just grabs my imagination and doesn't let go.)  

A little background: The first aerial photograph is widely considered to be one taken in 1858 by French photographer and balloonist Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, also known as "Nadar". Nadar took the photo from a tethered hot-air balloon 80 meters above the French village of Petit-Becetre, took eight separate images on a glass plate negative. Unfortunately, his original photographs are long gone, so the earliest surviving aerial photograph was taken by James Wallace Black in Boston, 1860. He caught a ride in Samuel Archer King's hot-air balloon, the "Queen of the Air" while it was tethered at Boston Common. 

 

I bring this up because it was really hard to get decent aerial photos before 1900.  There were some photos taken from kites, blimps, and even pigeons, but not many, and mostly made for specific purposes. 

 Julius Neubronner, Die Brieftaube als Photograph, in: Die Umschau, JG 12, Nr 41, 1920.  Link.

For even more fun background information, see the Wikipedia article on Aerial Photography.  Aerial images made in these very early days are widely available and often spectacular, but they're not collected anywhere in particular--it's just sort of hodge-podge. Search for your location / subject + aerial photography (maybe add in "kite" or "pigeon" or "balloon" into the search). But don't spend a lot of time on this--the number of images is small.

 

It wasn’t until the First World War that aerial photography took off (so to speak), with commercial photography services springing up.  The best known in the US was Fairchild Aerial Surveys. 

 

Meanwhile in the UK the big post-war aerial photo service was Aerofilms.  (It’s changed hands a few times—the images are available at National Collection of Aerial Photography).   

You can sometimes find the earliest images of a location by searching for a location + kite. When you do this for San Francisco, you'll end up finding the images immediately after the 1906 earthquake as seen from a kite flying over the east side of San Francisco. It's worth clicking on this image as it's pretty high res. (As a local, I can recognize many of the streets even now, 118 years later.)

Kite photo by George Lawrence of San Francisco after the earthquake of 1906. P/C Wikimedia

 

I bring this all up because... knowing the history of aerial photography is important in finding the images.  Most aerial images I’ve been able to find are in collections at libraries, archives, and museum.  And most often, they’re organized by location AND by the company or organization that collected the image. 

 

As my Maps Librarian friend Zoe wrote: “Aerial photography is sometimes publicly available, sometimes privately held or in copyright restriction. It can be indexed or preserved at the municipal, county, state level as well as other jurisdictions, as well as by land management agency in the case of state, federal, and tribal lands.” 

That caution of "sometimes" available is really true. Many collections require money, sometimes a LOT of money to access their pics.

With all that as warning, what CAN you do to find older aerial images?

To do a good search for OLDER aerial imagery, you’ll have to figure out WHERE you’ll want to look, WHEN you want to look, what ORGANIZATION holds the images, and the NAME of the outfit that created (or collected) the images. 

 

For instance, at Airphotos you’ll find the Benjamin and Gladys Thomas Air Photo Archives at the UCLA Department of Geography.  This includes images from the Spence Collection and the Fairchild Collections.  The Spence Collection is from Spence Air Photos, Inc. – All oblique low altitude black and white aerial photographs taken between the years 1918-1971.  The Fairchild photos are all from Southern California taken between 1927 and 1964.  The collection is huge, but most of it requires that you pay $80/hour if you ask them to do the research, or $40/hour if you visit in person. The biggest problem is that they don't really have overview images, so you can't really see what you're going to get. Great collection, but not exactly handy.

 

There’s also the Hatfield Aerial Surveys, available through the Online Archive of California (and the Stanford Archives - and a guide to searching the Stanford Archives). They're mostly aerial photographs of the Stanford University campus and Palo Alto. They're useful to me, but probably not to anyone outside of the 94304 Zip Code.

The point here is that you should try to search in an area, discover what collections exist AND who made them, then search for that collection by name.

For example, to find archival aerial photos of Rochester, NY (where I went to graduate school), I searched for:

[ Rochester NY aerial photograph ]

which led me to learn about the USA School of Aerial Photography, now collected at the Museum of Flight Digital Collections. Once there, I could use the search tool on their website [Rochester aerial photograph] and find a nice set of images. The same trick will probably work for your location.

Sample of the Museum of Flight Digital Collections

Point is, every place has their own set of collections.  You have to find the collection first, then dig in through their interfaces to find what you seek. 

In addition....  places that have some archival aerial images probably have some that are NOT part of their collection, but which are just scattered around and used kind of randomly.  

For instance, at Stanford, you can search on the Stanford.edu site for "aerial photographs" and discover the Stanford Atlas, which just happens to have a set of aerial images, many of which are not part of the Hatfield Survey. 

The deeper lesson here is that you need to find a plausible place that might collection archival photos (e.g., a local history museum, a university, a city library, a local archive) and then spend some time searching through their resources.  

Curious about the history of San Antonio, TX, I looked for their city website (santanio.gov), then did a site: search on Images.Google.com... and then filtered by color to black-and-white.  (I don't bother with filtering by dates because many photo dates are the date-of-scanning or date-of-upload.  Dang it.)  

Here's what that looks like-- [ site:sanantonio.gov aerial ]

Of course, if you search for a library, museum, or archive in San Antonio, you can quickly find UTSA Libraries Special Collections, which has a number of lovely archival aerial images that you can filter by date.  (In this collection, the date is actually the date the image was created.  Very nice.)    Note that I've done a search for all "aerial" images, and then time restricted the images.  

Aerial View of Alamo Plaza San Antonio, General Photograph Collection, 083-1019,
UTSA Special Collections

 

Most places seem to have some kind of aerial collection--the challenge is to find it (and then the next challenge is to figure out how to use each collection's sometimes wonky interface).  

A nice listing of Texas photograph collection can be found here Texas Historical Imagery Archive.  

 * 

What about the more general case?  Here's a listing of some of the US nation-wide collections you might consider:  

USGS Earth Explorer: The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) provides access to satellite and aerial images of various areas. It's especially useful for historical aerial photography.  (However... Difficult to use.  Often you can find the image metadata, but then you have to go elsewhere to actually download or purchase the images.)  

OpenAerialMap: A platform that offers free and open access to a variety of aerial imagery collected from different sources.  (But really spotty coverage. Very little in my area.) 

Historic Aerials: Good collection, but very similar to Google Earth's archive image function.  Costs money (and has annoying ads).    

Google Earth: There is a web version of Earth, but the application is MUCH better.  It's very easy to look back in time.  Here are the Google Earth images of Montmartre from 1949 and 2023. Contrast these with the photo at the top of the post taken by balloon in 1866. 

SearchResearch Lessons 

When you're searching for archival aerial images, there are a few things to keep in mind... 

1. Not everything is online--Trust me on this. A LOT of archival images are still stashed away in archive and library collections.  You might have to physically visit the collection in order to find what you really need.  Don't pass up the chance to visit the archive in person.  (You cannot believe the things I've found just because I was there.  The number of times an archivist has said to me "this isn't cataloged yet, but I think you'll find it interesting" is amazing.  Don't miss the chance to visit! 

2. Images are often in collections, but often NOT in the collection you might expect.  I managed to find a bunch of great aerials of San Francisco from the 1920s... in the collection of the University of Nebraska.  Keep your search broad and run down all of those leads.  You never know when you'll find the aerial image you want. 

3. When doing image searches, switch to black-and-white mode when you can.  That often helps limit your searches to early images. 

4. Call the librarian or archivist!  Really!  I made about a dozen calls when researching this post, and uniformly, they answered the phone (or actually called back).  Real humans are a great resource, especially as they can translate what you really meant to say into a working search.  

5. Realize and accept that searching for images is about the trickiest thing you can do.  The language and technology is complicated, but that's why you're a SearchResearcher!  You can learn words like orthoquad and understand why they're useful.  Spend the time to learn about the field--it will pay off. 

Keep searching! 

SearchResearch Challenge (8/14/24): Finding the earliest aerial photos from your area?

 Photos from the heavens... 

Early aerial photo by Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, aka Nadar, from a hot air balloon.
Near Montmartre, Paris, 1866. P/C Wikimedia.

... can reveal marvelous things.  Here's a 19th century white horse depicting King George carved into the hillside in southeast England. 

Osmington White Horse from 1808.  P/C/ Google Earth (2024)

As we saw last week, it's possible to find aerial photos of a particular region, but often tricky to find ones that are exactly of the place you want, and taken at the time you want.  

The Uffington White Horse was created some time between 1380 and 550 BC,
during the late Bronze Age or early Iron Age. P/C Wikimedia A recent photo
of an ancient image. 

In searching for the shellmounds of the San Francisco Bay Area, I was constantly looking at images that were close... but not quite on target.  Or I was looking at images that were a decade too late for the traces I was seeking.  

I bet I'm not the only person with this issue.  So let's do some collective problem-solving on this and figure out... 

1. What's the best way to find the earliest possible aerial photos taken of some area?  As we work on this, tell us how you found the earliest aerial images of the place where you live (Vancouver Island, Mexico City, Portugal, Rio de Janeiro, etc.)  

I wanted early aerial images of the area close to Stanford, Palo Alto, and Mountain View.  I found some.  More importantly: What lessons should we learn about finding aerial photos?  IS there a general method for finding historic aerial imagery?  Or does every place have it's own special and particular story?  

Let us know in the comment thread below.  

Keep searching! 

Even more: Can you find the shellmounds?

 Fascinating... 

Shellmound in Emeryville, CA, party torn apart. From Publications in American Archaeology and
Ethnography Journal, V 23 (1926)

Last week's Challenge was great fun, and as I mentioned, I spent a lot of time on this.  The Challenge definitely captured my Joy of Search!    

The original motivation for the Challenge came from walking past this bronze plaque that's in my neighborhood.  

But I have to take a this week off from SRS as I'm spending the next few days in Atlanta doing a annual site review for an NSF AI and healthcare project (AI-CARING).  Each year, NSF invites a small panel of folks in the field to review the work done over the past year and suggest, if needed, any changes to the plan.  So I'm kinda busy this week. 

However... as I mentioned, I found a LOT of material that I couldn't quite compress into last week's post.  If you looked through the comments, you'll see that lots of Regular Readers also found fascinating materials as well.  

One of the motivations for the Challenge was walking past this plaque at the corner of Middlefield Road and Webster Street, very near Marion Avenue in Palo Alto. 

 I looked high and low for an aerial photo of this area (or of the Castro and/or Ponce Shellmounds) taken before 1948.  I know that in 1948 the Castro shellmound was in the process of being deconstructed and sold as fertilizer.  You saw the best pix I could find in last week's story.  I just was not able to find great aerial photos from the before times.  Unfortunately.  

Interestingly, if you look up this plaque, you'll quickly find an essay by Benjamin Wright about this location, its geology, and the mounds that were here and how they were made.   

As he wrote: 

"The Muwekma/Ohlone would collect shellfish on a daily basis during the winter months, as it was their main staple at that time of the year. According to [Margolin], they typically returned to their villages with a day’s catch that was usually abundant. By the year’s end “they had collected literally tons of mussels, clams, oysters, olivellas, crabs, gooseneck barnacles, abalones, and other shellfish. As centuries passed the discarded shells piled up at village sites to form mounds. Some of these mounds were as much as thirty feet deep, some a quarter of a mile across . . . ”  These shellmound sites, also referred to as middens, or shell middens, by archaeologists, were reinforced with a mixture of soil and refuse [Chartkoff and Chartkoff]. 

Searching in Newspapers.com with location set to Palo Alto and searching before 1960, you can find articles that discuss the mounds, their locations, and what happened to them.  Here are a couple of samples:  

The Peninsula Times Tribune, Nov. 27, 1906.— The interest of scientists has been aroused by the discoveries made at an old Indian mound at Castro station, three miles south of here. The mound is owned by J. P. Ponce of Mayfield, who has been using its soil for fertilizer. Many skeletons of wild animals and human beings were unearthed in addition to various Indian ornaments and a vast quantity of sea shells. Prof. Harold Heath and Prof. J. O. Snyder of Stanford have investigated the mound and propose to make further excavations and send a collection of the relics unearthed to the National museum at Washington. The mound is the largest, yet found in this valley, being two acres in extent.

Another news article describes it as 

"300 feet (100 meters) in diameter and 10 feet high...even at that time (1893) ..they were the sites of villages... and the mounds contained the discarded shells as well as the bodies of the departed...during the early days of Stanford, you really hadn't lived until you had gone down to Castro and dug yourself up a skeleton or two."  

The mound also contained... 

"...whistles made of birds' bones, flint arrow-heads, beads of abalone shells, and mortars and pestles are among the booty now resting in museums or in private homes."  (PTT, Nov 19, 1946) 

Of course, since the Native American made mounds near streams, and streams are just about everywhere in the Bay Area, it's no surprise that there were many mounds.  The Nelson map included some 425 sites, but the full Nelson report comments that "it is not to be supposed that 425 exhausts the evidences of aboriginal occupation..."  

In my searches I found yet another map of shellmounds made by local historian and part-time surveyor Jerome Hamilton in 1937.  This shows the shellmounds around the city of San Mateo, along San Mateo and Blackhawk creeks.  

P/C San Mateo Historical Association

This map is in the San Mateo County Historical Association archives.  I found a reference to it in my Google search for shellmound maps, and was amazed to learn that it wasn't online, but if you just could stop by and visit the archive, you could see the map in person.

I spent a while with the map.  If you measure the distance between the railroad and El Camino Real (the major street in the area--neither the street nor the railroad have probably moved much in the past 67 years), we find it's nearly 500 meters.  

If the shellmound shown in the map (number 12) is depicted accurately, it's roughly 166 meters wide, much larger than the Castro mound.  

It's not a huge surprise that there are so many shellmounds in the SF Bay Area--they seem to have be made where there were people and streams.  If there was a stream that flowed into the Bay, you could pretty much reliably find a mound next to it.  In the following map you can see another dozen or so sites that we not included in the Nelson 1909 map.  Here's just what I located by map-diving... note that there was a stream every mile or two.  

As a consequence, there are MANY mounds... including some that are still being discovered today as people dig up the soil to do new construction.  Example: The new construction at "Elco Yards" in Redwood City, 37.4800228683888, -122.22562046367638 , just north of Palo Alto by a few miles. In an article from 2013, artifacts and bones were discovered while digging causing a long pause while the site was excavated and the remains repatriated.  

After the Guide to Bay Area Creeks. Each red dot is a shellmound that I found via online research as described.  Original base map based on work Guide to San Francisco Bay Area Creeks

As several authors have noted, Native American groups pretty much made mounds everywhere they went.  In my immediate neighborhood between Adobe and Matadero Creeks, I found reports of 5 or 6 mounds.  All of them long gone--carted away for fertilizer or buried under omnipresent construction. Stanford University, just 15 minutes away by bicycle has at least 60 sites on campus.  Just to the left of the ninth tee on the campus course, on a rise overlooking the nearby road, is a curiously shaped rock with a circular depression on top. A plaque informs golgers that the outcropping is an Indian grinding stone, once used by the Muwekma-Ohlone people to crush acorns into flour.  It's a huge rock that was on a great site--near a stream and thousands of oak trees.  A great place to live and create a mound or two.  

Bottom line: This is all pretty much Native land everywhere, with home places, village, and mounds everywhere throughout the Bay Area.  With a bit of online search, you can discover truly remarkable things--in this case, traces of people who lived here long ago, and stories that I never knew.  

As always, Keep Searching! 

==============

Chartkoff, Joseph L., Kerry Kona Chartkoff. The Archaeology of California. Stanford U P, 1984. 

Margolin, Malcolm. The Ohlone Way: Indian Life in the San Francisco-Monterey Bay Area. Heyday Books, 1978.