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We've had several reports of weird behaviour at the European mirror site of AltaVista (http://www.altavista.telia.com/). This is not the changing number of results syndrome, which by the way appears to be becoming more common on both the main and mirror sites and at all times of the day. AltaVista Telia tells you how many documents match your terms and you start to plough through them page by page. On some occasions, it comes up with the "No documents found ...." even though you may only be on number 31 in a list of perhaps 274. So far we have worked out the following: 1. It only seems to happen when you use the more advanced search features, for example quote marks round phrases, plus signs, fielded searches e.g. URL: 2. Rerunning the search a few minutes or hours later does not seem to make much difference 3. It doesn't matter at what time of day you carry out the search :-( 4. It doesn't matter how you access the results pages: if you work your way through the pages and get "No documents found" on the fourth set of results page, going direct to the fourth page still gives you no documents found. So it appears that for some reason AV stops compiling the results list. 5. Even on the results pages that say "No documents.....", the number of documents given at the top of the page clearly indicates that there are a lot more documents. I am waiting for a response from AltaVista, but in the meantime has anyone else been affected by this or found out what is going on? ------------------------- Karen Blakeman, RBA Information Services Tel:0118 947 2256, Fax:0870 056 8547 E-Mail:[log in to unmask] New publication: *Search Strategies for the Internet* http://www.rba.co.uk/publications/search.htm %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%