Search engine results are almost always wrong!

This is the mail which I sent to my team mates / group of friends in Verizon on 9th Feb 2006. I thought let me post it here as well.

Does search engines lie on the number of results shown for a search string?

I tried searching for the word "vadivel.blogspot" in Google. It said there are 178 results found. But actually they are able to display only 23 results. The funny part is ... at the end of the page there was this block of text.

"In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 23 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included."

So now I searched again including the duplicates as well .. still it is able to list only 168 results :)

After this, I searched the same search string in Yahoo it said 164 results are there. But on clicking 2nd page ... the numbers changed to 280!! very strange. Still they where listing 129 records only.

So to my knowledge the numbers which "Search engines" show is almost always wrong. Don't get misleaded by that number.

I tried the same search query on MSN and it returned only 23 results. No disclaimers found whatsoever. All 23 entries were unique and there were no duplicates. So to me MSN is the best search engine (atleast for this search string :)).

Hmm one another reason why we need to stick with Microsoft products.

Comments

Srini said…

Interesting :)

Now, how about the time they display for these search string. G,Y and M takes 0.51,0.22 and 0.25 seconds respectively. Any possibility for lies here also?

3:45 PM, May 13, 2006

Vadivel said…

Welcome to my blogspace srini.

That's an interesting question you have asked. I don't think I have any substantial facts before me to talk in favor or against it :)

7:59 AM, May 14, 2006

Script table as - ALTER TO is greyed out - SQL SERVER

One of my office colleague recently asked me why we are not able to generate ALTER Table script from SSMS. If we right click on the table and choose "Script Table As" ALTER To option would be disabled or Greyed out. Is it a bug? No it isn't a bug. ALTER To is there to be used for generating modified script of Stored Procedure, Functions, Views, Triggers etc., and NOT for Tables. For generating ALTER Table script there is an work around. Right click on the table, choose "Modify" and enter into the design mode. Make what ever changes you want to make and WITHOUT saving it right click anywhere on the top half of the window (above Column properties) and choose "Generate Change Script". Please be advised that SQL Server would drop actually create a new table with modifications, move the data from the old table into it and then drop the old table. Sounds simple but assume you have a very large table for which you want to do this! Then it woul...

AWS fatal error: An error occurred (400) when calling the HeadObject operation: Bad Request

While using AWS and trying to copy a file from a S3 bucket to my EC2 instance ended up with this error message. Command Used: aws s3 cp s3://mybucketname/myfilename.html /var/www/html/ Error: fatal error: An error occurred (400) when calling the HeadObject operation: Bad Request The error goes off if we add the region information to the command statement. I am using Asia Pacific (Mumbai) so used ap-south-1 as the region name. Modified Command: aws s3 cp s3://mybucketname/myfilename.html /var/www/html/ --region ap-south-1

[Non Tech] Want to know the recipe for Omelette :)

Fed up with Bread - Jam and Curd Rice, today i wanted to eat Omelette. Interesting part is I wanted to cook it myself :) So in the first picture you see all the items which are needed for preparing an Omelette. When I had a closer look at the eggs I see that almost all the eggs are broken. But believe me when I bought it couple of days back it was in perfect condition! I was wondering whether the eggs have become rotten or pretty old to consume! I tried taking an egg and break it but couldn't break it at all :) Since I have kept in the freezer all the eggs have frozen and looked like a iron ball :) After trying for few minutes of trying i removed the shell of the egg and then kept that iron ball :) into a bowl and placed it within Oven. I heated it for 1 minute and checked. It melted only to a limit. So i just set it for another 2 minutes and checked it later. It has melted but the part of the egg white has become a Omelette :( I didn't leave it there. I took the bowl out of ...

Vadivel's blog

Search This Blog