Web Search–Google
“Meet Mr. Anti-Google”
From the article, A crusading webmaster says the popular search engine’s page-ranking algorithm is “undemocratic.” I’ll share a few comments later on. For now it’s important to note that just about all general web search engines use some form of link analysis/page rank in their algorithm. One search engine that takes it a bit further is Teoma. For those of you web search aficionados out there, Teoma is a real world application of some of the concepts and ideas from the often discussed but never publicly released IBM search engine, Clever. You can learn more about Clever and link analysis in a 1999 Scientific American article. This 2001 Science article is also worthy of your attention.

One more point. From the article, “When you type “NameBase” into Google, Brandt’s site comes up first, but Brandt is not satisfied with that. “My problem has been to get Google to go deep enough into my site,” he says. In other words, Brandt wants Google to index the 100,000 names he has in his database, so that a Google search for “Donald Rumsfeld” will bring up NameBase’s page for the secretary of defense.” In our book Chris Sherman and I describe this situation as “depth of crawl”. Because one, five, or five hundred pages from a site are indexed doesn’t mean that the each and every page from the entire site has been crawled and is searchable. Also, because Google has indexed a certain number of pages from a site don’t assume that AlltheWeb has indexed more, less, or even the same ones. This is another in the continuing list of reasons why it’s important to use more than one engine and in some cases utilize site search and specialized search tools. Btw, a search of Google using the syntax site:namebase.org inurl:*.* shows that Google has indexed about 70 pages from Namebase.

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