Web Search Engines "Made Simple"

[Steve Harter]

> > 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.
> 

I've done this too, many times, as part of a project designed to count the
number of links to given URLs (a research project).  Reliability of one's
data is one of the most important considerations in research, and having
several different results for identical searches conducted within minutes
of one another gave me considerable pause.  The project is currently in
abeyance, but when it resumes I will probably use Hotbot, which did not
exhibit this characteristic. 

   Steve

      Stephen P. Harter,  School of Library and Information Science
      Indiana University                      Voice: (812) 855-5113
      Bloomington, IN 47405                     Fax: (812) 855-6166
                           <harter at indiana.edu>