Web Search Engines "Made Simple" -Reply

[Karen Harker]

This is similar to an experience I had with Alta Vista.  I was trying to see
who was pointing to us using the search string
'link:http://www.swmed.edu/home_pages/library/*.*'  (this is a trick I
learned recently from Ray R. Larson's Bibliometric analysis of the World
Wide Web).  

The first results page said I had 322 hits.  I clicked on the 'next' button for
the second 10 results.  That page said I had 1512 hits!  I click on the 'next'
button for results 21-30, but that page said I only had 29 hits!  I could go
no further, as it display 21-29 only.  I tried this series twice with the
exact same results.

I emailed the Webmaster at AltaVista, but have yet to receive a
response.  Does anybody have any clues?

Karen R. Harker
Information Resource Center Web Developer
UT Southwestern Medical Library
Dallas, TX
http://www.swmed.edu/home_pages/library/


>>> Mary-Ellen Mort <memort at netcom.com> 11/10/97 12:29am >>>
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