Relevancy? Where'd it go?

[Brett_Tabke]

I don't mean to pile on, but I just did 10 searches in a row and got some of the wildest results I have ever found on Alta. One group wasn't even related to the search in any way. Anyone else seeing things like this? It's like there is something wrong with the db.

[agerhart]

sorry Brett,
I can't say I'm with you on this one, I just checked on a few keywords for my sites, and all of the results are pretty much the same.

-A Gerhart

[toolman]

Outer space best describes the results....relevency? what's that mean?

[rcjordan]

My main SERP is screwed up, but still marginally relevant. Not the best array of sites offered in the T10, but OK. (I just made slot 10, so obviously it could be more relevant, i.e., mine higher.)

One thing I did notice; AV is "pairing" 2 pages from the same site, one right after the other, so 8 of 10 come from 4 sites.

[Brett_Tabke]

They must be messing with the database.

[rcjordan]

>pairing

AV must be having some problems with .cfm files, I just noticed that the large majority of the 2nd pages in the pair are .cfm extensions.

>so obviously it could be more relevant

Wait a minute, maybe this is a keeper... just looked at 11-30, I have 8 out of the T30 on 5 domains (distinct content, on-theme).

[agerhart]

sorry about that.......I just tried to do a search on 'donating money to homeless people' and got back four or five results w/ the title 'Bill Gates Net Worth'.

-That thing is definitely weird right now!

[Laisha]

>I just tried to do a search on 'donating money to homeless people' and got back four or five results w/ the title 'Bill Gates Net Worth'

It's not so weird if you check out the page...

I've just tried 15 of my random searches on AV, and I don't see any problem either. Transient, perhaps?

[agerhart]

I only checked out one of the pages, but the one I checked out had the first mention of anything remotely to do with donating money to the homeless or to any charity a long way down the page (which is pretty long).

[pete]

AV's database is definitely bezonked - they must be doing something - Results have been changing over the last week or so with some of our old pages featuring on occasions - relevancy's not great!

[oLeon]

no, I canīt see this, either - BUT I really can imagine what you mean, Brett. In Germany, AV.de is really strange due to its resultlistings.

You got different results when you search for
hauck buggy [search.de.altavista.com] or
+hauck +buggy [search.de.altavista.com]
Both searches shall give you the same results (as mentioned of AV itself) because AVīll "show first the documents containing the words close together". BUT itīs wrong, you get some results which contains only one of both keywords.
And the results are quite different!

[Brett_Tabke]

I was looking up golf related kw's yesterday and got back results from pewter chess set makers.

[Michaelangelo]

Brett-

I agree...I've spent alot of time viewing source code of high ranking pages at Altavista, trying to get a handle on their algo changes...theres no rhyme or reason. It's all over the place. Many searches brought up totally irrelevant results.

[JuniorHarris]

>>"I was looking up golf related kw's yesterday and got back results from pewter chess set makers."
Funny, I was searching for a pewter chess set....all I got were golf sites?!? Maybe they're sending results back to the wrong user?!? <kidding!>

[Robert Charlton]

Relevancy has begun to look better to me in the last week or so, since AV has started reshuffling. I'm curious how others see it.

[4eyes]

Looks more relevant to me also.

I have a good definition of 'relevant'.

'when my sites are in the top ten = relevant results'

I am not sure that the 'golfing' and 'pewter chess set people' will agree though!

[JuniorHarris]

LOL, results have been steadily getting better as well as traffic volume. It would be nice to see AV reclaim some market share.

[msgraph]

I'm beginning to wonder if AV is showing more of their "raw" database. A while back there was some discussion about how listings.altavista.com had a larger database than www.altavista.com.

Like if you searched for links:www.domain.com you would get 255 results in AV proper while if you did that same search in listings.altavista.com you would see a larger number like 2,500 links.

Or let's say you searched for "keyword phrase" in AV proper. You would see for example 1,000,000 pages found while in listings.altavista you would get 20,000,000 pages found.

listings.altavista.com appeared to be their whole database while www.altavista.com appeared to be the cleaned up version.

I've been doing a lot of searches in AV this past week and I am seeing way more pages found under various keywords than normal.

I've seen anywhere from 11,000,000 to 80,000,000 pages found under these keywords. Usually the pages found should be around the 1,000,000 to 9,000,000 range.

Another thing I've noticed these past few days is that when I do some cross-checking on log files, I see can only find my site half the time in the search referral. Definitely some major index rotation going on.

I think we just need to wait another week or so for them to stop rotating and cleaning house on this index. Then things should be a little be more clearer.

Note: This is only for pop and semi-pop keyword searches.

[vis]

"I see can only find my site half the time in the search referral"

You know, that was exactly the figure I have been coming across. It feels like there are two ranking algos at the moment being deliberately rotated. Both sets of results started appearing in this latest large update and are pretty constant.

[Hunter]

>I just tried to do a search on 'donating money to homeless people'

Laisha...Next time you get the urge to donate, don't bother searching, just click on my name...it's easy...