Overlap Category Archive
Salaries, Overlap, and the Perils of Phrase Searching
Summer's over, so it's time to start posting and updating SearchEngineShowdown again. I'll start off with yet another screencast of unique results found at only one or two search engines, but this search is also an example of the peril of relying too heavily on lengthy phrases for finding the best answers. The story: I ran a quick search at Google in response to a question at the reference desk about the starting salaries in engineering. I found a site with data from a 2005 NACE survey. Since the NACE site only makes its data available for a fee, I...
Conflicting Overlap
I seem to be on a roll lately in finding Web pages that are not indexed by Google and are only found by one search engine. Yesterday I was exploring LibraryThing, a social networking and book cataloging site. I became curious as to how well the search engines covered the personal pages that people create in a social networking site like LibraryThing. So I took a look at two user profiles, grabbed a unique-looking phrase from the profile page and checked to see which, if any, of the main Web search engines could find it. Each page was found by...
Page Found at 3 or 6: Not Google
While working on an upcoming presentation, I came across a Web page that I could not find on Google. The page has been at that URL, on a Canadian academic, site since at least 2003. I was rather surprised to not find it there, so I decided to try a quick overlap showdown. The comparison showed that it was indexed by Yahoo!, Gigablast, and Exalead, but it was not found by Google, Live, or Ask. So here's another screencast showing the lack of overlap between search engines. This is a short screencast (01:30). If the embedded version above does not...
Overlap Showdown: Only at 1 of 6
Maybe it is just the type of searches I run, but today I had yet another example of the lack of overlap at the major search engines. I was searching for more information about someone for whom I only had their AIM screen name. Searching that screen name at Ask, Exalead, Gigablast, Google, Live, and Yahoo! (although not in that order), I found one page, that actually had the information I wanted -- the person's name. The one page was found by only one of the six search engines. All the rest found zero results....
HereUAre, Gigablast, 10 Billion, and Spam
Ever heard of HereUAre, which has "Over 10 billion pages indexed?" Try a search and you may recognize the results as coming from Gigablast. So what's the connection? This leads to a rather strange story of a vanished press release that I've been researching on and off for the past month or so. Here's the story. In trying to update my site awhile back, I came across one page that linked to a June 19, 2006 press release from Gigablast about a database size increase to 10 billion and a new "report as spam" feature. The linked page (beta.gigablast.com/prnew.html) was...
Why Search More than One?
Here is another example of a search I ran today where several search engines failed to give me the answer I needed. In particular, I was looking for a cached copy of a Web page, since the page was unavailable when I tried to view it. Three search engines failed to have any record of the page, but fortunately, that last one I tried had the page indexed and a cached copy available for me to view. The winner? Live Search. The losers? Ask, Yahoo!, and Google....
Wikipedia as Source?
An interesting posting today first claimed that the U.S. Dept. of State shamelessly stole text from the Wikipedia: At this point some of you may ask just what the heck the US Dept. of State was doing, but let's take a moment to clear things up. First, it's obvious the Wikipedia page has been around for quite some time, and has evolved from that older state. . . . the US Dept. of State page doesn't even mention Wikipedia I find this posting fascinating in that some people assume that the Wikipedia is an old, established resource. Obviously, the author...
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