Web Search Engines "Made Simple" -Reply

[Martin Courtois]

On Tue, 11 Nov 1997, Karen Harker wrote:

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

I think Karen is right on target in terms of what we need to do to get
answers to our questions re: search engine inconsistencies.  We can only
go so far in our analysis from a user's perspective, but we can push
producers for complete explanations to problems we encounter.  I'm sure we
all remember the case not too long ago where the webmaster from American
Federation of Scientists discovered that only about 10% of his site's 6000
pages were indexed in Alta Vista.  I imagine he had to nip pretty hard at
AltaVista's heels to get an explanation for this.  But, as a result of his
perseverance, we have a new age of "honesty" among search engine
producers; everybody pretty much admits that they don't index the entire
the Web, but provide only a sampling, particularly from larger sites. 

Judy Chen from HotBot seems to be the only rep from a major search engine
who participates in Web4Lib, and her answers to questions raised in this
thread have been the real gems of the discussion.  Maybe we need to invite
other search engine producers to participate in this list? 

*********************************************************
Martin Courtois
Biological Sciences Reference Librarian
Hodges Library
University of Tennessee
Knoxville, TN 37996-1000
423-974-8693
mcourtois at utk.edu
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