Phil Payne <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: <snip> >Simple test - do a search on Google. Any search. Let it default to 10 hits >per page, and >collect all the pages.
>Then repeat the search, asking for 100 hits per page. >Compare the results. They will be different. What they don't tell you is >that each of your >10-per-page searches might be served by a different data center, using >different indices and >different databases. >Google is a sham, as perusal of the sources above will rapidly show. It >succeeds because the >mass of people trust what computers produce and there are no checks or >balances. Internet >search engines are the largest unregulated aspect of human activity. No, Google succeeds because "Good enough is good enough" (SM, me). It works well enough to satisfy end-users, so they use it. Yes, Big Daddy is a problem; yes, many webmasters are unhappy; but Google continues to work well enough to power the Internet economy (high-falutin' words, but, in my experience, NOT overblown). The complaints about varied results, stale pages, intermittent spidering, etc. go back to ... Well, forever. They're evidence of suboptimal-ness, not "failure" or "a sham". I'm not in love with Google, have no stake in them (wish I did!), but the vitriol heaped upon them is unreasonable. Google works, period. 10**n successful searches per day prove that empirically. ...phsiii ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
