Web Search Engines "Made Simple"

[Mary-Ellen Mort]

On Sun, 9 Nov 1997, Linda Absher wrote:
> I recently did a search on AltaVista and came up with no *no* results; I
> was surprised since I've done the search before on AltaVista and came up
> with at least five items.  I hit the search button again and got the five;
> this made me curious so I hit the button again:  this time nine items were
> retrieved.


I wasn't going to bring this up. But Linda's experience gives me courage.
Last week I taught a class and a student and I entered EXACTLY the same 
altavista search and got different results (I got something like 2,000 
postings and she got something like 600) ...I checked carefully that the 
searches WERE identical--they were--and then I just had to shrug my 
shoulders and move on with the class.

How often do we get a chance to do simultaneous duplicate searches?

I have also had experiences with excite where, as I work through a long 
set of results, the number of matching sites changes wildly from page to 
page.

As someone pointed out earlier, you get what you pay for. I guess we can 
ask for our money back.

Mary-Ellen Mort
JobSmart Project Director
http://jobsmart.org