oversearch

present singular third person oversearches · participle present oversearching · participle past oversearched · past oversearched

1. archaictransitiveTo search all over.

   To oversearch the fearful ocean

   1861, Robert Greene, George Peele, Alexander Dyce, The Dramatic and Poetical Works of Robert Greene & George Peele, page 89

2. To search excessively.

   But people undersearch far more than they oversearch: We tend to explore situations less thoroughly than our own goals recommend!

   1995, David Perkins, Outsmarting IQ: The Emerging Science of Learnable Intelligence

   1 more example

   Oversearching: If you look long enough and hard enough for any particular pattern in a data set, the more you look, the more likely you are to find it—whether it's meaningful or not.

   2003, Dorian Pyle, Business Modeling and Data Mining, page 363