Forum Moderators: open
"For more common searches with hundreds or thousands or even millions of matches, the accuracy will vary according to how busy the system is. In crunch times, system resources automatically focus on the main function -- providing useful search results to millions of people in a few seconds -- and common searches may be truncated, because there is no need to look at the entire index to handle them well. That means that the count that you get during a busy time may not be close to the count you would get at a relatively slow time. If you really need an accurate count, try connecting on the weekend or evenings. "
pulled from here...
ABOUT THE PAGE COUNT in Altavista's Help Section [help.altavista.com]
Searches made around 13:00 GMT
free movies
We found 58,256,844 results:
The number of Web pages that contain your search terms: free movies 120188 • movies 19767231 • free 145698884
movies
We found 14,506,082 results:
The number of Web pages that contain your search terms: movies 19766744
software
We found 59,105,939 results:
The number of Web pages that contain your search terms: software 90297671
free software
We found 3,178,133 results:
The number of Web pages that contain your search terms: free software 1660396 • software 90297263 • free 145691752
music
We found 72,890,746 results:
The number of Web pages that contain your search terms: music 85999825
free music
We found 2,427,635 results:
The number of Web pages that contain your search terms: free music 407621 • music 85999143 • free 145698884
games
We found 42,044,316 results:
The number of Web pages that contain your search terms: games 48307759
free games
We found 148,977 results:
The number of Web pages that contain your search terms: free games 783284
Search made around 17:00 GMT
free movies
We found 26,022,160 results: free movies
The number of Web pages that contain your search terms: movies 19746494 • free 145729863
free software
We found 90,924,005 results: free software
The number of Web pages that contain your search terms: software 90301646 • free 145705298
free music
We found 94,912,238 results: free music
The number of Web pages that contain your search terms: music 86017784 • free 145729863
free games
We found 32,172,813 results:free games
The number of Web pages that contain your search terms: games 48044345 • free 145698167
The top results under these searches have pretty much stayed the same for the past few days. BUT 2 or 3 widely different variations appear on different rotations. You can definitely see above that they are changing the quantity(quality too sometimes) of sites indexed depending on time and/or high-activity as well how they show the pages that contain the keywords. I also find it weird that they do not display the whole search phrase in the second set of results listed above.
For example on the second set you will not find pages that contain free movies like the first set. You will only see the pages that contain movies and/or free.
So are second set of results from peak hours on AV? It's easier for them to find the pages with either free or movies than it is to search and find the results for free movies.
Go and do a search on Altavista of a popular search phrase. Take a look at the pages found number. Now click on the search button again, look at the number. And again....and again
Sometimes the number will change and sometimes it won't. I did a few tests and for ten clicks on the search button the number stayed the same, on the 11th click it changed, on the 12th click it went back to the "original."
Is that because on the 11th click, AV's server was briefly overswamped so it gave me a second set of results? Looks like it but I could be wrong.
Is it there fault for doing this? No. It's their search engine and if they need to save resources then they will have to do whatever it takes. But, it's going to affect their users and those who submit their sites. Their suger daddy, CGMI, just posted a loss of $965 million. I don't think it's going to get any better.
NOTE: This does not apply to all popular searches on Altavista. Some search results have been staying quite consistent lately. Also, I used free here because it seems like they have a major bug with displaying "free whatever" results and I'm sure a lot of people out there try to get listed with something free. I'm just trying to give an idea on why the numbers are changing on many of the search results.
I will try to post more on this later after a few days of checking results.
that's if anyone is interested
