Forum Moderators: open
So I'm curious: what in your experience is the slowest google search you've seen. When searching for a phrase of stopwords (above) I've managed to get consistently slow responses from google for the first uncached search. If you hit reload, it's fast - and I'm sure the above phrase will be fast once a few of us hit the SE. But if you wait a while and the results expire from cache, you'll notice it's slow as heck.
My theory is that stopwords are kept in a seperate index so they don't clog the main index, and are only used for phrase searches. What's interesting is Yahoo's search simply drops stopwords from your phrase and consider's them a wildcard: "ban a bomb" returns lots of "ban the bomb" sites.
[For the record, I don't have any affiliation with the two sites that come up for the above search]
Without the quotes, I got
======================
The following words are very common and were not included in your search: the a of to in an. [details]
The "AND" operator is unnecessary -- we include all search terms by default. [details]
Web
Did you mean: the a and off to in an
News results for the a and of to in an - View today's top stories
The successors - Daily Times - 8 minutes ago
Jets Defensive Coordinator Faces Old Team - Kansas City Star (subscription) - 9 minutes ago
No standard web pages containing all your search terms were found.
=====================
In quotes....
Tip: Try removing quotes from your search to get more results.
Your search - " the a of to in an" - did not match any documents.
=====================
No times on either...
DerekH
[For the record, I don't have any affiliation with the two sites that come up for the above search]
Are you a competitor? Look around you might learn something ...
If you want to stop the caching you could also try to add nonsense exclusion words like that "blue widgets -jffjakd" should work I guess.
My theory is that stopwords are kept in a seperate index so they don't clog the main index, and are only used for phrase searches. What's interesting is Yahoo's search simply drops stopwords from your phrase and consider's them a wildcard: "ban a bomb" returns lots of "ban the bomb" sites.
We use a search system for a complex site. We index non-stop words providing the name of pages which include that word, and then search that page for the actual phrase.
So, if you were searching for "ban the bomb" we would first locate pages containg "ban", and pages containing "bomb" and search them for "ban the bomb".
It's not the greatest solution, but it works, and we are not indexing 8 million pages <g>
Matt
"the a and of to in an" -"aaa" -"asdadsasd", and the result was 6.66 seconds ;)
I can see it already. Some rapper calls himself "the a and of to in an" and Google suffers a denial of service attack from crazed teens looking to download mp3s.
Slowest I found at least - 8.45 seconds. And this thread is the first result. And who said Google was stale?
And who said Google was stale?I did. I own www.theaofandto.com which I launched in June. I have over 500 backlinks with theaofandto as anchor text pointing at my site. In addition my 'to' subdirectory has hundreds of links pointing at it as well. The same goes for the 'a', 'and', 'of', and 'the' subdirectories. Though Google has thousands of pages about the subject indexed from my domain, I still can't be found on the first twenty pages of results.
Now returning to the original subject matter. I haven't been able to get anything over .44 seconds using any combination of stopwords. Not sure why. Surely I hit upon something that wasn't cached.
