Subject: more about search engines

From: "Nadav Har'El" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 9 May 2001 18:24:19 +0300

A while ago we were discussing search engines, and how they rate the pages
they show first.

Sometimes, however, you are looking for something obscure enough that you
are willing to get almost anything on the subject - but you want the
search engine's crawler to have crawled enough of the web to find what you
are looking for.

For example, today I was looking pages on a Villancico [that's a type of
Spanish music from the 16th century] titled "Riu Riu Chiu". You might
imagine that searching "villancico riu chiu" (which sounds like someone
coughing and sneezing more than sensible search terms) you wouldn't find
much.

Interestingly, the search-engine I tried, google.com, alltheweb.com
and altavista.com, all returned several dozen matches. The quality of rating
was similar, although I would say altavista returned them in the least useful
order: the first was some page in Japanese, and I was surprised to see my
Netscape show all the Kanji and Hiragana ;)

But other times when I'm looking for rare information (e.g., hard to find
"illegal" mp3s :)), I found that usually alltheweb.com has more coverage
of the web than the other search engines. I was wondering what was other
people's experience: what search engine covers the most of the web? Maybe
there's another search engine that I don't know that focuses on quantity,
not quality?

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |    Wednesday, May  9 2001, 17 Iyyar 5761
[email-masked]             |-----------------------------------------
Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |From the Linux getopt(3) manpage: "BUGS:
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |This manpage is confusing."

---

From: Oleg Goldshmidt <[email-masked]>
Date: 09 May 2001 18:52:00 -0400

> coughing and sneezing more than sensible search terms) you wouldn't find

Just search with Google in Spanish - it gives very relevant results.

-- 
Oleg Goldshmidt | [email-masked] 
"I'd rather write programs to write programs than write programs."