AltaVista Strange Results

[Eric Rumsey]

>> At a guess I would say that AltaVista has 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.
>
I'll second this yes ...  When doing "needle in the haystack" searches
rather than broad searches with many hits, search engines seem to be quite
consistent - For the past several months, I've done systematic searching
every 2-4 months for some of our own pages, using boolean searching to find
odd/unique combinations of words that only occur on a few pages on the web.
I've found search engines to be consistent, even over a period of months.
(I've been doing Alta Vista and Excite the longest, but have done others as
they've gained boolean search capability, and have found all to be
consistent).

Our own little search engine guide page is at -
http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/hardin-www/search2.html

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Eric Rumsey, Hardin Library for the Health Sciences
University of Iowa, Iowa City IA 52242
<eric-rumsey at uiowa.edu>
319-335-9875 (voice), 319-335-9897 (fax)
Hardin Meta Directory of Internet Health Sources
http://www.arcade.uiowa.edu/hardin-www/md.html
Featured in Internet Medicine (Lippincott-Raven), June 1997