You are all stars!! The question was posted to LIS-UKeiG and the AIIP
(Association of Independent Information Professionals) discussion list,
so we have a good cross section of serious and very able searchers and
information professionals on the case!
Do keep the results and comments coming in.
So far some very interesting feedback. They confirm my thoughts on the
initial "problem" which was that most of the time the search does come
back with fairly consistent results in Google but occasionally comes up
with 0, which only a handful of you have reported so far. I shall keep
you all in suspense as to what I think is going on there for a little
while longer.
There have also been reports of major regional variations e.g. Google.ca
vs Google.com
Many of the comments have highlighted that the Welsh language version of
the pages are given priority. Comments and thoughts on that would be
welcome. But an interesting trend is that the total number of results
appears to be steadily increasing throughout the day if the time stamps
of the emails are anything to go by. Started off at around 40,000 in
both Google.com and Google.co.uk but now seems to be running at around
48,000 - 49,000. Has google detected an unusual interest in this area
and started adding yet more pages form the site to its index ? :-) Or
were searches directed to one set of servers at the time and which have
a larger database?
Many of you commented that although Google said that there were over
40,000 you only initially saw 67 to 92 results. Telling Google to re-run
the search including the omitted results gave anywhere between 230 and
371 results. Standard behaviour for Google these days and difficult to
tell how many of the mega total is genuine. It does sometimes seem as
though Google just makes up a number.
Yahoo seems to be consistent but disappointing in the number of pages
that it actually displays. In general I have always felt that the site
command was less effective in Yahoo and this seems to confirm it. Or is
it that Yahoo does not have the coverage of Google? Or is it that Google
is better at indexing dynamic pages and database driven sites? A large
chunk of the charity commission web site is a database.
All results, thoughts and ramblings welcome.
Karen
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Karen Blakeman, RBA Information Services
88 Star Road, Caversham, Berks RG4 5BE, UK
t: +44 118 947 2256 m: +44 7764 936733 f: +44 20 8020 0253
Mailto:[log in to unmask]
http://www.rba.co.uk/
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