Web Search Engines "Made Simple"

[Sheryl Dwinell]

How annoying. I tried this search in Excite and had a similar experience as
you did with Hotbot. Evidently 'date' is a stopword there too. However, I
tried this on Alta Vista. With +date +rape I got 22,070. With "date rape" I
retrieved 7156 hits. I also got good results doing a search with "date
rape" in Infoseek. The first 20 or so hits from each engine were relevant
to my search, unlike hotbot or Excite. This is one reason we encourage
folks to try their search in as many engines as they have patience to try. 

I was thinking that it would be nice if the major search engines would all
allow you to execute another search on the results you get (a la Infoseek)
in which it wouldn't matter if you used a stop word or not, particularly
since you're executing your search on a much smaller subset than the entire
index. Kind of like limiting a search in an online catalog.

I find that search engines in their current incarnation can be incredibly
frustrating to use. Knowing why you get "squirrely" results is all well and
good, but it certainly hinders the user's attempt to find relevant
information (e.g. date rape). 


Sheryl Dwinell * Cataloger/DBM Librarian/Webmaster
Memorial Library * Marquette University
P.O. Box 3141 * Milwaukee, WI 53201-3141
414-288-3406 * dwinells at vms.csd.mu.edu