[Web4lib] Another Google question

[Roy Tennant]

This is a much more serious issue than the hit count problem. The  
fact that you can use this product as instructed, and it is unable to  
function as advertised is inexplicable. I've often wondered why  
people (and especially librarians) are so eager to give Google a  
"pass" that they would never give to Microsoft. Sure, I use Google a  
lot, and for what I use it for it can be very effective. But that  
doesn't mean I'm rendered blind to its shortcomings. As you've  
demonstrated, these shortcomings can be serious and substantial. It  
would be great to have one spot that identifies all of these  
searching issues, but unfortunately I can't take it on.
Roy

On Jul 5, 2005, at 2:22 PM, Sloan, Bernie wrote:

> Here's another thing with Google that I don't get...
>
> Over the weekend I used the Page-Specific Search on the Advanced  
> Search
> page to find pages that link to the page:
> http://www.lis.uiuc.edu/~b-sloan/e-ref.html. I got five results.
>
> Then I did a Google search for the name of the document associated  
> with
> that URL. I got quite a few results ("about 271"), but only went  
> through
> the first 50. Twenty percent of those results (10 of 50) had live  
> links
> imbedded in the corresponding documents matching the URL above.
>
> To the best of my knowledge, none of these ten documents were included
> in the five results from the "find pages that link to the page" search
> off of the advanced search page.
>
> I'm probably missing something obvious, but why would a "link to"  
> search
> come up with five documents, while the second search came up with ten
> documents with the same URL as a live link, with little or no overlap
> between the two result sets?
>
> Bernie Sloan
> Senior Information Systems Consultant
> Consortium of Academic & Research Libraries in Illinois
> 616 E. Green Street, Suite 213
> Champaign, IL  61820-5752
>
> Phone: (217) 333-4895
> Fax:   (217) 265-0454
> E-mail: bernies at uillinois.edu
>
>
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