[Web4lib] Another Google question

[Patricia F Anderson]

Hi, Lars,

Interesting question -- why look at lots of results. For myself, I rarely 
look at more than the first 300. When I do, the query will fall in one of 
these categories:

  - a topic of passionate interest where I truly want to see every possible 
link (and I will spend *days* going through *all* links up to the max 
displayed);

  - a topic where the first 100 only sporadically revealed anything 
relevant, and I have not found the magic combination of terms to focus the 
search.

Because I am someone who tends to skim large search results, I have my 
Google preferences set to display 50-100 links per page of results, so it 
doesn't take me long to skim large results sets.

What makes this question especially interesting to me is that I recently 
attended a Grokker demonstration. They emphasized that a core aspect of 
the purpose of Grokker's interface is to allow the serious researcher to 
rapidly scan large results sets (research veresus search <g>). Their 
arbitrary limit for Google is 1000 results per page, but this can be 
customized by the end-user. Now, if someone is developing and marketing an 
interface for this purpose, one might think there is at least *some* use 
for some persons in being able to get beyond the first few pages of 
results. It will be interesting to see how Grokker does, how their product 
is used, and what types of persons find it most useful.

Best,

Patricia Anderson, pfa at umich.edu

On Wed, 6 Jul 2005, Lars Aronsson wrote:

> Patricia F Anderson wrote:
>> Ijust tried a search for the word "the". Reported results were
>> 3,190,000,000. Maximum displayed results were 946. "Repeat the
>> search" button yielded the same number. I tried a few others,
>> with equally unpredictatble results.
>
> Perhaps they have a filter that can tell real searchers apart from
> librarians just trying to test the system.  For example, no real
> searchers would be interested in more than the first 900 hits, so
> if you still click "next page", you are just testing.
>
> I'm sorry for my ignorance, but what would be the point in finding
> the 947th and 948th hit for any search expression?
>
>
> -- 
>  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
>  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
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