July 2000 Archive
Google Adds Advanced Search
Google has finally introduced an Advanced Search form. It has domain limits, language limits, and the ability to request up to 100 hits at a time.
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Unclustering is in Vogue
At last, two more major search engines that cluster results by site now offer functional ways to uncluster the results. HotBot's filter, announced below on July 6 now seems to work. Google has been showing only the first two pages per site with no option for unclustering all of the results. Now, for searches that find less than 1,000 hits there is a brief message at the bottom of the last page of hits:
"In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the ones already displayed.
If you would like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included."
Try this search on tilinca with hits set to 100 and then click the link at the bottom to see the unclustered results. By the way, Google has changed the language on its display back from "Show matches (Cache)" to the original "Cached." Sometimes common sense prevails.
New Size Showdowns: iWon & Google on Top
I have finally updated my Relative Size Showdown and the Total Size Estimate analyses. Using 33 search terms, and verifying the actual number of hits available, iWon (using an Inktomi GEN3 database) and Google certainly found the most. The half billion record databases can find more, but they did not find that many more hits than some of the others.
Note that only with the iWon Advanced Search (which does not cluster results) was used. The basic iWon search will only display one page per Web site with no option for seeing the others.
New Brief iWon Review added with this information and a list of some of the databases available on iWon.
How Big the Web?
HotBot has attempted to introduced the ability to uncluster results. On its advanced search page a new option to disable its "Best Page Only Filter" is supposed to do this. Unfortunately, in my testing, it does not yet work, nor does it make much difference in the search results.
For example, "salammoniac" finds 31 hits with our without the "Disable 'Best Page Only' Filter" checked. Yet some of the sites displayed do have additional Web pages available via the "See results from this site only" link.
It is a worthy goal, but HotBot needs to make the filter work properly! Showdown HotBot Review updated.
Google Results Now Appearing on Yahoo!
Google results now appear on Yahoo! (although this may not yet be the final switch. A few observations:
- Results are clustered with only one page per site as opposed to the two per site available on Google.
- Even with the greater clustering, Yahoo! finds fewer than regular Google.
- The ranking of results is also slightly different.
- Clicking on the [More results from . . .] doesn't work right yet. It actually brings up all results from that site, whether or not they contain the keyword.
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