AltaVista Strange Results

[Even Flood]

At 05:42 12.11.97 -0800, you wrote:
>Really though, what possible difference can it make to a user if there are
>30,000 or 50,000 hits? I defy *anyone* to show me a student who tracked
>down even 2,000 hits, let alone these larger numbers. What matters here is
>relevancy, not numerical sameness....
>**************************************************
>Barbara Stewart, Latin American Cataloger
>Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA
>(413)545-2728
>stew at library.umass.edu
>

It makes a great difference whether you get three or ten hits.
Or thirty versus hundred hits.  Which is the kind of
searches I do on the great robot engines. My experience
is that if your searches run into the thousands, you should
not be using robot indexes, but go to one of the man 
generated structured indexes instead, like Yahoo!, BUBL or
the WWW virtual library. Chances are  that if 
you are searching for some thing big or comprehensive, someone
has already done the important job of sorting them
and put in a web catalogue, and Yahoo! and the 
others are very good at picking up those.The web cataloges
 are then by far the best web tools.

BTW - the Encyplopaedia Britannica is testing
out a web catalog at http://www.ebig.com/ which
has impressed me quite a bit. Try it!

Even

Even Flood,  Senior Research Librarian               
Norwegian DIANE Center, University Library of Trondheim, 
N 7034 Trondheim, Norway. 
Phone: +47 73 59 51 62, Fax +47 73 59 60 97
even.flood at ub.ntnu.no
<*>
"Come, and take choice of all my library, and so  beguile thy sorrow."
				(Shakespeare)