[WEB4LIB] AltaVista bafflement - "santa fe" "Santa Fe"

[Tara Calishain]

Man, this is REALLY wacky! I agree with Miriam; this is completely counter
to what I expected of AltaVista, given my understanding of how they handle
case-sensitive queries. I'm cc'ing this to the AltaVista support people.

I tried the same case queries with "Santa Ana" and "santa ana" which 
gave me more normal results ( 47513 and  68648 respectively.) I also 
tried "san francisco" and "San Francisco", which also gave me expected
results. Shaping the query as "santa fe" vs. santa;fe didn't make any 
difference.

Miriam, I did notice that if I went to the AltaVista advanced query screen
( http://www.altavista.com/cgi-bin/query?pg=aq&what=web&kl=en ) and 
typed "santa fe" in the boolean query box, I got 303166 results. Typing
"Santa Fe" got 154768 results. That may be a good workaround, though
it doesn't explain why AltaVista is behaving this way.

Puzzled,

Tara



At 08:44 AM 5/10/99 -0700, Miriam Bobkoff wrote:
>AltaVista is the search engine I use all the time, and the one I teach to
>library patrons, because I thought I knew what it does. The following
>behavior really confuses me. Any explanations gratefully accepted.
>
>"santa fe" yields only 9 hits
>with caps, "Santa Fe" yields 148103 hits
>
>Surely this is backwards from normal AltaVista behavior. As the help file
>says, "When in doubt, use lowercase text in your searches. When you use
>lowercase text, the search service finds both upper and lowercase results."
>
>"santa fe poetry broadside"  no hits
>"Santa Fe Poetry Broadside"  58 hits
>+"santa fe" +"poetry broadside"  76 hits
>+"Santa Fe" +"Poetry Broadside"  38 hits
>
>Thanks very much for any clues. This must be something obvious that I should
>already know, but I don't.
>
>Miriam Bobkoff                        mbobkoff at ci.santa-fe.nm.us
>Santa Fe Public Library
>145 Washington Avenue
>Santa Fe, NM 87501
>(505) 984-6832     The Library's Page  http://www.ci.santa-fe.nm.us/sfpl/
>