[Web4lib] RE: Another Google question

[Sloan, Bernie]

I received an answer from Google regarding the question I had in the
following note. An excerpt:

"Our link search does not return a comprehensive set of results. The
results will show a sample of the links that point to your page, but
this list is in no way indicative of the link structure utilized by
Google to formulate a page's PageRank."

Bernie Sloan

-----Original Message-----
From: Sloan, Bernie 
Sent: Tuesday, July 05, 2005 4:22 PM
To: web4lib at webjunction.org
Subject: Another Google question

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