Stephen Leary at The Reflective Librarian has an interesting post in which he compares the shifting number of results he gets over time with Google Book Search. Live Search Books (MSN) provides stable results, but neither service actually allows you to see the results after a certain point. I tried to leave him this comment, but it wasn’t accepted by his setup:
But Stephen, we all know that only the first page of results is all that matters! 😉 Really interesting post – t’would be interesting to see a long-term graph of how the results vary for a handful of phrases. Wonder if it varies by location of the searcher as well? Here are my results for GBS: “next attack”= 911 (the first three hits are all the same book and citation!) “homeland security”= 5120, and Sapajous= 568
Comments
One response to “Google Book Search vs Live Search Books”
This sounds like a difference in search algorithm for those of us with small site our google position moves up a down the front page daily. While MSN is much more stable.
Isaa c Huffman