AltaVista Strange Results

[Leonard Will]

In article <Pine.OSF.3.96.971112082547.810A-100000 at emily.oit.umass.edu>,
Barbara Stewart <stew at library.umass.edu> writes
>Really though, what possible difference can it make to a user if there are
>30,000 or 50,000 hits? I defy *anyone* to show me a student who tracked
>down even 2,000 hits, let alone these larger numbers. What matters here is
>relevancy, not numerical sameness....

Yes, but presumably these systems complete their retrieval operation
before sorting the results into order of relevance. It may be that some
of the most relevant items are among those that they fail to retrieve
because of a time or number-of-items cut-off, so we never see them.

Leonard Will

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