Sunday, March 18, 2007

Used GOOGLE lately?

I wasn't sure if this was a suitable posting for Grumpy Old Men but I thought it was of general interest and not necessarily right for our Second World War Blog.

This post concerns the number of Hits one gets when looking for a particular subject.

The subject is partly covered in Wikipedia at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:R._fiend/The_Google_Test

but I then went on to do some of my own research on various subjects, as below:

798,000,000 Sport
792,000,000 History
747,000,000 Books
608,000,000 Film
513,000,000 Science
495,000,000 Arts
441,000,000 World War 2
410,000,000 Sex
296,000,000 Religion
223,000,000 Drama
176,000,000 Word War II
72,600,000 Churchill
35,600,000 Hitler
13,900,000 WW2

I then got a bit "selfish" and keyed in: "Ron Goldstein"+"WW2"+"BBC" and was gratified to get 974 "Hits"

Have any of you noticed any other numbers like this on your own pet researches?

posted by Ron Goldstein at 11:06 am

3 Comments:

Blogger Peter G said...

To quote myself Beware, though, of hits 'found' and hits 'accessible'. Google, like all other search engines, curtails the millions of hits you can access to the top 1,000. (from my website)

In fact, you seldom get the full thousand. I entered two terms which were sure to get a very high number of hits: 'Britain' and 'USA'.

In Google, 'Britain' gets 172 million hits, 'USA' a gigantic 671 million.

I have my results page set to 100 hits per page, thus ten pages equals one thousand. In both cases I get ten pages but the last page is short. In total 907 for 'Britain' and 909 for 'USA'. If I include excluded ... similar this last figure rises to 966.

No matter what you search for, your name for instance, you more or less get the same number of accessible results, in the hundreds rather than the thousands. 'Ron Goldstein' gets 556 results (26,100 hits).

So are you being short-changed? Not exactly. If you spent five minutes at each site it would take you 80 hours to visit 960 web pages. Even with an incessant 8 hours' day, that would take ten days. Given that Google picks out what it considers the top thousand most relevant, by limiting the hits to one thousand it is really doing you a favour.

2:33 pm  
Blogger Ron Goldstein said...

St.Peter is, as always, perfectly correct when he says "Ron Goldstein' gets 556 results (26,100 hits", but, and there always is a "but" I beg to differ about his point regarding searching for my own name.
I always make a point of entering "Ron Goldstein" "BBC" "WW2" rather than just Ron Goldstein... this ensures that I don't get Ron Goldstein the Porn entrepreneur, Ron Goldstein the Film Producer and all the sundry Goldsteins scattered around the world that have no connection with your man in Cockfosters.

3:44 pm  
Blogger Peter G said...

Ron

My point is that there is a vast difference between the number of hits and the number of accessible pages, regardless of the subject.

For detailed searches I use Google's Advanced Search.

"With Advanced Search, you can search only for pages:

# that contain ALL the search terms you type in
# that contain the exact phrase you type in
# that contain at least one of the words you type in
# that do NOT contain any of the words you type in
# written in a certain language
# created in a certain file format
# that have been updated within a certain period of time
# that contain numbers within a certain range
# within a certain domain, or website
# that don't contain "adult" material*

(from Google's guide to searching)

Of all these the NOT command in particularly useful. Actually you can use the Boolean operators + and - on the main page. Minus (-) translates as NOT immediately before a term.

Clicking 'Pages from the UK only' is very useful too.

But then, I don't have the problems you have, Peter Ghiringhellis are a bit thin on the ground. :)

4:21 pm  

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