AltaVista Strange Results

[Danny Sullivan]

> At a guess I would say that AltaVista have set a time limit on
> searches. When the time limit expires the hits retrieved thus far
> are returned. If you hit search in a quiet period then more
> results are returned as the search will execute quicker. 

Yes, this is exactly correct. It also seems to have been magnified 
recently by the expansion of the index from roughly 30 million to 100 
million web pages.

This is a particular problem when doing a popular url: or site: style 
search. These put more of a burden on the service.

A solution can be to use one of AltaVista's mirror sites. They have 
exactly the same information, maybe only a few days old. But they 
have far less traffic, so your searches will get farther than they 
might during a busy US period.

danny





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Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Watch
http://searchenginewatch.com