[pmwiki-users] WikiWords and Google

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Sat, Mar 04, 2006 at 07:17:41PM -0700, H. Fox wrote:
> On 3/4/06, Patrick R. Michaud <pmichaud at pobox.com> wrote:
> > > Results 1 - 10 of about 442,000 for rollingstones. (0.11 seconds)
> > > Results 1 - 10 of about 25,300,000 for "rolling stones". (0.12 seconds)
> >
> > This doesn't really answer the question -- the question isn't
> > whether the search results are the same (we know they won't be),
> > but rather if a search for "rolling stones" would find a page
> > named "Rolling Stones".
> 
> Typo?

Yes, typo.

> >  The above results don't tell us anything
> > about whether the 442,000 pages found by "rollingstones" also
> > appear in the 25,300,000 results for "rolling stones".
> 
> It was only intended to show that the two are not interchangeable.
> 
> To find out if rollingstones gets /indexed/ as "rolling stones" you'd
> do something like this
> 
> Results 1 - 10 of about 13,400,000 for "rolling stones" AND
> rollingstones. (0.29 seconds)
> Results 1 - 10 of about 13,600,000 for "rolling stones" OR
> rollingstones. (0.31 seconds)
> 
> and the two would be the same, no?

Those two *do* look about the same to me -- there certainly isn't
a significant difference between them ( < 2% ).  But perhaps
what we're seeing there is that most pages describing 
"Rolling Stones" are going to have links in them to rollingstones.com.

> Hey... Doesn't it seem like that bottom one should be greater than 25,300,000?
> 
> <tries previous searches again>
> 
> Results 1 - 10 of about 15,100,000 for "rolling stones". (0.13 seconds)
> Results 1 - 10 of about 249,000 for rollingstones. (0.12 seconds)
> 
> The math seems to be getting a bit fuzzy over at Google...

It's always a bit fuzzy.  I don't think that Google actually counts
pages to determine the "about" figure -- I think it's a statistical
estimate.  I've noticed this even within a single query -- for
some queries, clicking on the "next" button to get the next set
of pages seems to reduce the number substantially.

> p.s.:  The fact that one of the sites I found when searching for SEO
> information runs PmWiki must mean something.  :-)

Really?  Which one?  (I suspect it may be a biased sample.  :-)

Pm