AltaVista Strange Results

[Helen R Lloyd]

> Actually, that is not a good idea, judging by my results 
> yesterday. I did several searches on AltaVista  at
> www.altavista.telia.com
> in Sweden and AltaVista in the US. The result were
> a) consistent in that I got the same numbers of hits 
> every time I repeated a search at the same site,
> b) consistent in that I got roughly three times as many hits in 
> the US version as in the European "mirror" on all the search terms I
> used. 
> 
This is something I have also noticed when using the Australian 
mirror of AltaVista.  I did the "date rape" search and got over 7000 hits 
on the U.S. site and "about 2000" on the Australian mirror.  The search 
page and options are also different.  The Aussie mirror doesn't have the 
Refine button, or the option to search in different languages.

I thought a mirror site was supposed to be an exact copy.  I can 
understand that at any given time the mirror sites won't be as up-to-date 
as the original site, but there should not be that much difference.

Helen Lloyd



Helen Lloyd                         | email: ulhrl at dewey.newcastle.edu.au
Faculty Librarian (Art & Design)    |
    and Library Web Manager         |
Huxley Library                      | Ph  (intl+61+2) 49216455
University of Newcastle, AUSTRALIA  | Fax (intl+61+2) 49216904