Thanks, I'll give that a try.
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ If you're gonna be dumb, you better be tough +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
Yeah, I canceled my Google subscription and what I do now when I need to search for information is drive from town to town across the country knocking on doors and asking folks at random. Much more useful and much less time consuming.
:)
Ricky (who'd give up sliced bread before Google any day)
And, of course, if nothing else works:
Remember that the term can appear anywhere on that page, not just in the visible text, but in the source code comments and the header terms. Many web sites use a standard header that contains key words for *all* their pages, resulting in every single page on their site meeting your search terms. Those that have your terms (or some of them) in the text will be ranked higher (usually) but a lot of those late pages fall in this category.
That's the why - don't really know what to do about it. I was thinking just yesterday about a pay-per-search system where you could make a request to a real person (probably in India, natch) who could do the hard work for you.
One trick that helps is to put together a phrase and include it in quotes. "wooden car", for example.
-- "We need to make a sacrifice to the gods, find me a young virgin... oh, and bring something to kill"
Tim Douglass
Yep, and that is a problem.
I do that quite often. It helps some, usually reducing the results from on the order of 800,000 down to a more manageable 250,000. :-)
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ If you're gonna be dumb, you better be tough +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
Someone mentioned MetaCrawler. Tried it today and it is way better than Google for getting relevant hits. I used the example I gave earlier in the thread. YMMV.
Here's the url:
... snip
Thanks! That's a keeper. I just tried it with one of the search items that indicated how bad using Google has become:
In google, typing in "John Deere 420 tractor operator manual" returns
60,800 hits. With metacrawler, the same search phrase returns 50 hits. A cursory look indicates that the top hits with metacrawler are equally, or more relevant than the ones with google.+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ If you're gonna be dumb, you better be tough
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------+The Mark & Juanita entity posted thusly:
That's because you didn't enclose the string in quotes. Try the same phrase in quotes and you'll find it returns 4 (Yes, only
4 (four)) hits, and ALL of them are relevant.That search returns quite a number of irrelevant hits.
Methinks you are too hard on Google.
Larry
That may be the case, but by enclosing that in a quote string would preclude hits that include things like: Operator Manual for Tractors: John Deere 40, 50, 70, 420, 520, 720 Tractor operator manuals: John Deere 420U, 420W, 420T Manuals for sale, tractor operating, John Deere 420
All of which would have been relevant but would not have met the strict quoted search criteria. I have done searches like that only to have *no* results returned. Loosening the criteria by one or two words, or permutations of those words is both time-consuming and often results in a step increase in results (as in from none to 10,000+)
50 hits is a whole lot easier to sort out than 60,000+
The above was offered as one simple example of why Google search results are becoming problematic. It was not meant to be all-inclusive. As I indicated above, yes, one can really tighten down the search criteria by requiring exact matches to quoted strings, the problem with that is that one then may miss something that is completely relevant but misses by only one character. OTOH, when submitting a search request to find *all* of the words in one's search, getting results in which only 80% of those words are visibly present for the searcher is a signifcant source of the data overload. Whether that is due to the web site spoofing the keywords with the html source code, or Google returning results that include those words on referenced pages in the search result doesn't matter to the end user, he is still overloaded with data.
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ If you're gonna be dumb, you better be tough +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------+The Mark & Juanita entity posted thusly:
Well, to me, that falls under the general category of using the tool correctly. If you are trying to saw wood, a file will work, but it isn't the best way.
It's an art form. Combining exact phrases with single words can result in excellent filtering, as can specifying "without" words and limiting the search to title only, text of page only, etc.
Hmm.. you ARE using "Advanced search", aren't you?
See comments on limiting search to certain parts of a page.
Larry
I'm tried probably most of the search tools out there, and I still prefer google. Yay google.
Wed, Dec 21, 2005, 5:50am snipped-for-privacy@ewol.com (Thomas=A0Bunetta) doth adviseth:
Tried it, long ago. I only use stuff like that on the very few occassions when I'm really, really, intensely, searching - along with Northern Light, Dogpile, and so on - told you, I've tried about all. Otherwise, still prefer google. Yay google.
JOAT You'll never get anywhere if you believe what you "hear". What do you "know"?.
- Granny Weatherwax
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