[WEB4LIB] Very strange AltaVista result

[Tara Calishain]

At 07:34 AM 11/16/99 -0800, Even Flood wrote:
>Folks!
>
>I have just been giving a seminar on Internett searching
>to several Norwegian librarians, and during that, I got some of
>the strangest search results yet while trying out AltaVista.
>
>1) I search for +diabetes. Result: 1,044,090 pages found.
>2) I search for +diabetes +domain:no to get results
>from Norwegian servers. Result:95 pages found.  Not much, but some.
>3) Then I limit further by keeping the search string, but limiting the
>language to Norwegian. Result:  1498 pages found.
>??????
>4) Finally, I drop the +domain:no and limit only to +diabetes in
>Norwegian language. Result: 92 pages found.
>???????

Hi Even!

This is GOOFY.

After playing with it, I'm wondering if Altavista is making some assumptions
about what language it's searching under. Do a search like this:

+diabetes +domain:no

and specify the English language. You'll get 105 results. Do you think that
maybe AltaVista is default searching in English? No, that won't work...

There's something funky going on with the language search. +diabetes 
+domain:no
in  ANY language gets 95 results. +diabetes +domain:no  in English gets
105 results. +diabetes +domain:no in Norwegian gets 1498 results.

I'm cc'ing the AV people on this...

Tara