Search engines and positronic brains

[Jean Hewlett]

This made me curious how my favorite search engine, Alta Vista, would fare in
the Riverbank sweepstakes.

I did a simple search on "Riverbank Publications" (with quotes around the
phrase).
I got 8 hits. The first document returned was
http://www.rtcom.us-inc.com/ccb/ccb1.html
I went to it, did a Find On Page for riverbank, and was taken directly to a
clear summary of what the Riverbank Publications are, including which papers
were included in specific print volumes.

Next I searched on this question: What are the Riverbank Publications? (no
quotes)
I got 4,846,233 hits. The first screen seems to be mostly references to
rivers, plus a few links to plays, towns or companies with the word Riverbank
in their names.

Searching on Riverbank Publications, with no quotes, returns 2,962,075 hits.
The first page looks pretty much like the one I got when searching with a
question.

Jean Hewlett
North Bay Regional Campus Library, University of San Francisco
hewlett at usfca.edu

Bob Duncan wrote:

> At 12:45 PM 6/2/99, Joyce Ward, Director, Content Classification, Northern
> Light Technology LLC wrote:
> >I took the Ask Jeeves challenge, then I did the same query:
> >
> >What are the Riverbank Publications?
> >
> >in Northern Light.
> > . . .
> >Note that the top 10 documents or so are relevant, and that we generate a
> >a folder for 'Cryptography'.
>
> I hate to be picky, and I'm sure Joyce is a very nice person who works very
> hard to make our lives easier, but...
>
> Out of the first 10 documents, two are 404s and the other 8 are various
> forms of bibliographies.  I suppose a reasonably intelligent person could
> figure out based on the bibs that the Riverbank Publications have
> *something to do with cryptography*, but to consider these results
> "relevant" to the query "what are the Riverbank Publications?" is
> stretching the definition of relevant close to the breaking point.
>
> Also, the "or so" documents (namely results 11-15) refer to a painting
> ("The Riverbank");  a grassroots coalition ("save Riverbank Park");  a
> piece of software ("RiverBank");  an industrial complex;  and a publication
> ("Riverbank Review of Books for Young Readers").
>
> NL did a good job of floating the most-likely-to-be-relevant docs to the
> top of the 2100+ results returned, but I doubt this had little to do with
> so-called "content classification" -- the search "riverbank publications"
> (with quotes) turns up 11 records in NL.  Looks like simple phrase
> weighting to me.
>
> Bob Duncan
>
> ~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`~`
>   Robert E. Duncan
>   Systems Librarian
>   David Bishop Skillman Library
>   Lafayette College
>   Easton, PA 18042
>   610-330-5156
>   duncanr at lafayette.edu
>   http://www.library.lafayette.edu/