AltaVista bafflement - "santa fe" "Santa Fe"

[Kendall Hobbs]

At 11:06 AM 5/10/99 -0700, Laura Cohen wrote:
> ... 
>The search that Miriam Bobkoff related to this list today isn't the only
>inconsistency you'll find at AltaVista. For example, AltaVista is supposed
>to default to OR logic, except in cases in which you search on a phrase
>that appears in its phrase dictionary. Right? Well...
>
>Try this search:
>
>	title:Mars    host:nasa.gov
>
>This search defaults to AND logic, as all results come from the nasa.gov
>site. ...

I recently heard from a colleague that AltaVista was supposed to have
changed its default to AND, but I hadn't tested or confirmed that rumor
yet. I just quickly perused their help page and didn't see anything about
the default logic (though it was a quick perusal so I may have missed it),
but I just tried the following searches and got these results: 

       search term(s)                number of hits
              mars                     1,844,953
           mars jupiter                  615,650
     mars jupiter mercury                635,900
  mars jupiter mercury pluto             423,990
mars jupiter mercury pluto mickey      1,103,810

So I'm not sure what it is doing. I don't see any pattern to these results. 

By the way, the last search had, as its #5 result, a page titled "Terry
Pluto on Mickey Mantle and Jerry Garcia." None of the other planets showed
up anywhere in the document. 8 of the other top 10 were about Disney
characters, and the only one about planets was titled "TINY PLUTO NO MICKEY
MOUSE PLANET." 


 - Kendall Hobbs
   Olin Library, Reference
   Wesleyan University