oversearch

Verb

oversearch (third-person singular simple present oversearches, present participle oversearching, simple past and past participle oversearched)

1. (archaic, transitive) To search all over.
   • To oversearch the fearful ocean1861, 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
   • 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