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Stowe Boyd is a well-known media subversive, and an internationally recognized authority on real-time, collaborative and social technologies. His new blog is Message.
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September 14, 2004

Auren Hoffman on GoogleNumbers

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Posted by Stowe Boyd

Auren Hoffman has been tracking the various search engine results based his own name, and has found a wide disparity in results:

Auren Hoffman
[from Summation]

Every week for the last nine months I have done a search for "Auren Hoffman" in eight major search engines (Google, Lycos, All the Web, Teoma, Gigablast, Wisenut, Yahoo, and A9). I recorded only the raw number of results as my objective was to understand the reach of each search engine rather than the accuracy. Since, as far as I know, I'm the only "Auren Hofman", the results are fairly finite and easy to define.

[...]

[Synopsis of findings]

1. Fluctuation in weekly results

2. Numbers that end in zero

3. There is a huge discrepency between the search engines

I guess I am not surprised about the findings. The various search engines look at different numbers of sites, and have different algorithms for 'forgetting' old links. The fluctuation is associated with activity (like posting something that gets a lot of hits) or forgetting (when old stuff gets purged).

I was intrigued so I checked "Stowe Boyd" at the various sites (like Auren, I am the only one with that moniker, so its fairly safe to assume that the great majority of hits really are about me):

Yahoo: 25,700
Google: 15,800
All The Web: 30,000
Teoma: 5,340
Gigablast: 2,452
WiseNut: 365
A9: 6,680

I looked at some of the back pages of Yahoo's search, and , yes, they were about me.

It fairly clear that if you want exhaustive searching, you have to go to the bigger players who spider through blogs, PDFs, and less accessible places to glean all the links.

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