Internet searching

I often wonder about the benefit of a search result that might look like this ...

About 1,940,000,000 results (0.60 seconds)

It's obviously a very impressive result. But who would ever consider wading through 1.9 billion references?

What's your take?

Sam

[assuming a Google search]
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Try refining your searches, Sam

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For example: sam stones model engineer

finds: About 12,700,000 results (1.04 seconds)

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Whereas: “sam stones” “model engineer”

finds: About 6 results (0.26 seconds)

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You can also prefix a word with the minus sign to exclude it

Note: The previously very useful plus sign, to force inclusion, no longer works

... allegedly because they invented Google+ and didn’t want to confuse people

MichaelG.

Many thanks Michael.

Yes, it was a Google search. I had been thinking that their 'speed-of-light' results was them just showing off.

Not knowing of such a simple device, your explanation shows clearly that I have much to learn. [The more we know, the more we don't know.]

By the way, I had never realised how popular I was with 12.7 mega-hits

Sam

Just to complete the demonstration:

This morning: “sam stones model”

finds: About 1 results (0.29 seconds)

MichaelG.

Michael, just be careful with Google - all your searches are stored, linked to your identity, as part of Google's 'big data' initiative. You have been probably been recorded as searching for a male model...

Does Google not remember Sam Fox in its algorithms ?

... Why is sam considered an exclusively male name ?

... Why shouldn’t “sam stones model” be interpreted as a potential news headline ?

MichaelG.

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https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/let_him_who_is_without_sin_cast_the_first_stone

Edited By Michael Gilligan on 17/10/2019 08:57:02

A good reason for using DuckDuckGo although it seems US-centric and sometimes doesn't find things Google can.

I saw that headline. Can anyone remember what sentence Sam got for this brutal assault on one of our fellow hobbyists?

Ah, just seen Michael's interpretation of this ambiguity!

Neil

For the ordinary Joe the size of the search result is a hint he should follow Michael's advice and tighten up his search terms.

Not everyone on the internet is an ordinary Joe though - I occasionally use 'Beautiful Soup' which is a Python module for automatically retrieving and parsing HTML pages : it's a tool for mass extraction of web data for offline processing rather than casual browsing, and one application is analysing the results of a large search. Google, DuckduckGo, Yahoo and others build their search indexes by 'spidering' the web. It can be crudely done by reading all the pages on a website and recursively following every link to every other website and all its links.

Website owners can be seriously upset by visits from these tools! I might decide to scan the whole of the Model Engineering site with the innocent motive of creating a better index. Thoughtlessly done, my home computer on a moderately fast internet connection could easily overload MyTimeMedia's servers. Unless told not to, a program doesn't behave like a human user slowly retrieving pages and reading them, instead it requests pages as fast as the network running flat out permits, thrashing the web server with a load equivalent to many thousands of people. (Chances are the web server is programmed to detect and throttle single users submitting multiple fast requests, but even so an inconsiderately written program would block and delay legitimate users.) The size of a search result can be used by these programs to detect an accidentally excessive search, or to deliberately find them with a view to rationalising them: Google do a very job displaying the most likely hits first and this intelligent ordering doesn't happen by accident.

Finding small results is more challenging than big ones. A 'Google Whack' is a two word search request that only finds one hit. Really difficult to do. I'm tempted to bring the internet to its knees by writing a badly automated search...

Dave

Michael -

I wonder what would happen if you typed 'Michael Gilligan internet search' in as an internet search?

Would it never stop incrementing itself??

And I do know the actual answer!!

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< yawn >

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