[Web4lib] RE: Another Google question

[Andrew Mutch]

I can confirm this experience myself and it's been in this state for some
time. In the past, checking who was linking to specific resources through
Google seemed to give a fairly comprehensive list of sites that linked to
the resource. But over time, the resulting lists seemed to shrink even as
list of sites known to be linking to the resource had grown. I finally
gave up on it being an accurate reflection of what they claimed to provide
and the note from Google just confirms what I had suspected at the time.

Andrew Mutch
Library Systems Technician
Waterford Township Public Library
Waterford, MI



> So, in other words, the Google "link:" search is worse than useless.
> Useless because it fails to work as advertised and worse than useless
> because it will return just enough so one could imagine it was
> working as they supposed (and as depicted by Google). Does anyone
> else feel the wheels starting to come off the car?
> Roy
>
> On Jul 15, 2005, at 7:36 AM, Sloan, Bernie wrote:
>
>> 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
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Web4lib mailing list
>> Web4lib at webjunction.org
>> http://lists.webjunction.org/web4lib/
>>
>>
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Web4lib mailing list
> Web4lib at webjunction.org
> http://lists.webjunction.org/web4lib/
>