Re: Limit to googles search?

[mjmahon@aol.com (Michael J. Mahon)]

In article <b66becf.0302271023.22a5c953@posting.google.com>, grent@comcast.net
(Geo3) writes:

>mjmahon@aol.com (Michael J. Mahon) wrote in message
>news:<20030225232147.27196.00001506@mb-ba.aol.com>...
>> In article <b66becf.0302251239.4f45d3cc@posting.google.com>,
>grent@comcast.net
>> (Geo3) writes:
>> 
>> > Well it has nothing to do with a time limit or how long you do a
>> >search. But there is a limit. Something like a freeway to divided
>> >highway, dirt road then a path that stops.
>> > I went on I.E. and the same thing happened. It now showed a few more
>> >entrys, up about a hundered from 210500 to 210600 or was it 21500 from
>> >21600. I tried going back from the beginning to were I was stopped
>> >with Netscape. Well around when I started to hit 500 it was slower,
>> >and would start to come up with the no results page coming up. But a
>> >quick go back and then on to the next results would move me forward. 
>> >After 700 this was happening a lot more. After 730-740 it took about
>> >25 -30 times before I could move forward on to the next 740-750. But I
>> >could not get beyond 750. I must have have went back and and forth
>> >between clicking on the Back arrow and the next results a 100 times.
>> >It kept coming up NO RESULTS FOUND, check spelling ect.
>> 
>> May I suggest that anytime you see more than 150 or so hits, it means
>> that you should NOT start looking through all of them, but instead you
>> should add additional search qualifiers to refine your search to a more
>> reasonable number of better matches.
>> 
>> Tens of thousands of hits is an invitation to be more specific.
>> 
>> -michael
>> 
>> Check out amazing quality 8-bit Apple sound on my
>> Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/
>
>Hi,
> There has to be a problem with there engine. While looking what
>RamFast+CDrom that would be compatable with RamFast a search with
>Google brought up 65 hits. That I would say is specific enough.
> BUT I was only able to bring up 30 of them, before then hitting the
>wall of "Your search has no results" or whatever it says. Very
>strange.
>
> Alot of the times that people search is they do not know what they
>will find. To limit it, limits us to what is out there.

The results you can receive are not "limited" except by relevance
measures, which is exactly why you use a search engine in the
first place.

Google's search engine is optimized to provide the first page of most
relevant hits in the quickest possible time.  This means that the "x of y"
hits message has a rough upper bound, y, on the number of relevant
hits based only on keyword vectors.  As you click through the hits
presented, or even through the _pages_ of hits, it notes the hits you
find interesting (if you clicked on any) and also uses the fact that you
are interested in more than the first page to spend more time refining
the hit list.  If you notice, the number of hits, y, changes after each
click, and the number of "next pages" displayed at the bottom.

After you have reached the end of the "next pages", as determined by
Google's relevance score, the message:

"In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted
some entries very similar to the 28 already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included."

If you then click on the "repeat the search" link, you will get almost all
of the hits originally reported, with some changes to relevance depending
on what you have already clicked on.

Don't get hung up on the exact number, y, reported on the initial hits page.
It's only a quick estimate, based on the cardinality of the keyword set
intersection, without much attention to relevance scoring beyond the first
few pages.

There is a reason that Google is the world's most popular search engine:
It delivers very relevant results very quickly.

Don't feel "limited" by it--you are empowered by it!

-michael

Check out amazing quality 8-bit Apple sound on my
Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/