Re: Altavista better than Google for genealogy searches

John Prentice wrote:
> Renia wrote:
>> I searched for "family tree" in "exact phrase" plus "growdon" in "all 
>> of these words" and got 431 results on Altavista. 357 on Google.
> 
> The thing that doesn't seem to be mentioned in all the comparisons is 
> this - it's not the number of hits, it's the quality of hits that 
> counts, and their categorisation. In other words, if you're faced with 
> 10,000 hits, you're going to want them sorted by relevance, and you 
> aren't interested in duplicate pages.
> 
> A good search engine won't just present you with 10,000 hits in random 
> order, it will give you what it "thinks" is the best order for you. If 
> it does it both honestly (putting the commercially-interesting ones 
> first is what killed Altavista) and accurately, it's a far more useful 
> engine, even if another engine gives you 12,000.

Quite. You have to know how to manipulate your search engine.