[WEB4LIB] Norway, Diabetes and the new AltaVista.

[alastair.smith at vuw.ac.nz]

There are a couple of possible factors:
- Alta Vista times out searches at busy periods, and often gives inconsistent boolean results because of this.
- some searches on domain names produce spurious results e.g. link:no will pick up any occurrences of .no in file names, eg .../myfile.no/ (however I don't think this applies to domain:)

--
Alastair Smith, Director MLIS
Senior Lecturer, School of Communications and Information Management
Victoria University of Wellington, Aotearoa/New Zealand
Ph 64 4 463 5785 | Fx 64 4 463 5235 | http://www.vuw.ac.nz/~agsmith/

-----Original Message-----
From:	even.flood [SMTP:even.flood at ub.ntnu.no]
Sent:	Thursday, May 18, 2000 8:45 PM
To:	web4lib
Subject:	FW: [WEB4LIB] Norway, Diabetes and the new AltaVista.

Folks!

Some time ago I sent a report and a question about
AltaVista and the confusing results I got for searching after
Norwegian diabetes information. Well, I tried out the new AltaVista
and the numbers still do not make sense. On a large scale 
there is some pattern, but on a small scale, it is a mess. Check in
particular the number of sites I got for searching
for Diabetes, limited to both Norwegian sites and Norwegian
Language. Results of today, May 18th 2000.


-----------------
Simple search:
Diabetes: 748 285
Diabetes  in Norwegian: 141
+Diabetes +domain:no in Norwegian:  2181
+Diabetes  +domain:no 127 

----------------
Advanced search - all pages:
Diabetes: 932 351
Diabetes and Domain:no in Norwegian: 1,607
Diabetes and Domain:no: 2,147 
Diabetes in Norwegian: 1800 


At least the latter are internally consistent, but not with the simple search.
However, If I add sort by "diabetes" and mark for one result pr website, 
the numbers are *excactly* the same as for the simple search. Unfortunately,
that  also makes little sense, especially  the numbers for the
double restricion result to both Norwegian language and Norwegian sites.

BTW - "Raging" gives the same results as the simple search.

I sure do miss the good old days when at least we knew what 
was going on and what we were getting.

Still confused, but at least all this work keeps my
activity up and bloodsugar down!

Even

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Even Flood,  Senior Academic Librarian               
RBT/Norwegian DIANE Center, 
University Library of Trondheim, 
N 7491 Trondheim, Norway.
Phone: +47 73 59 51 62, Fax +47 73 59 60 97
http://www.ub.ntnu.no/diane/
"Come, and take choice of all my library, and so  beguile thy sorrow."
				(Shakespeare)