Search "Only SGM Pages" By Using Beseen
Search "Most tchester.org Pages" By Using Google
Comparison of the Two Search Engines For This Site Beseen indexes just the pages in the tchester.org/sgm directory, and reindexes the entire directory every Sunday. In addition, Beseen uses a soundex search, which produces results that are more immune to misspellings, at the cost of giving results that aren't relevant. For example, "bailey canyon" and "baley canyon" both find the same 174 pages of search results, which include the 30 specific pages that contain the term "bailey canyon", as well as terms that share some consonants with "bailey" such as "blue" and "below".
Google indexes all the pages in the entire tchester.org domain, with a slower reindexing schedule. Thus it may return San Diego or Santa Rosa Plateau hiking pages in addition to SGM hiking pages. This could be good or bad depending on what you are searching for. Google is widely acclaimed to be very good at producing extremely relevant results for your search terms as long as you spell them correctly and as long as the pages are older than ~2 months. For example, "bailey canyon" gives superb search results (the specific 30 pages that contain the term "bailey canyon"), but "baley canyon" produces no results.
If you are sure about the spelling of your search terms, I recommend you try Google first, and then try Beseen if you get no matches. Judging from the search terms reported to me by Beseen, misspellings abound, so most users may be better off trying Beseen first to get the correct spelling, and then try a Google search to retrieve the specific pages of interest. However, remember that Google may not be as current as Beseen.
You may want to try both search engines until you see which one gives you the better results for your queries, or you may want to always search using both engines.
On 1/20/01, Google had indexed 487 pages for the entire tchester.org site, and Beseen had indexed the entire 368 pages for the tchester.org/sgm directory, both correctly representing the total number of html pages at the time of their last reindexing. Beseen had reindexed as of 1/14/01, but Google had last reindexed the pages in November 2000, over six weeks earlier than Beseen. Thus Google missed entirely ~20 pages created since then, as well as the updates in a number of other pages.
Search "Only SGM Pages" By Using Beseen If there is no search box above this line, you have either disabled javascript or beseen's search function must be down, and therefore not available. If the latter, try later!
Search wasn't working properly for the first few weeks of June. Beseen changed their javascript reference, but didn't bother to tell me. Then when they did answer my query about search not working, they gave me the code for my Fallbrook site, telling me it was for this site! But I can't complain since they provide this service for free. As of 6/18/00, it should now be working properly.
Warning: your search may not find pages added or modified in the last month! See the Update Log for pages changed since the last search engine database update.
I haven't been able to find any technical documentation on how this wonderful free search service from Looksmart's Beseen Web Tools works exactly. (The ads on their search results page support them.) Their general keyword search help section simply says:
Don't worry about using plus and minus signs, quotation marks, asterisks, or any other symbol to narrow your search. These symbols are known as Boolean operators and are not necessary when searching with LookSmart.A test showed that "-keyword" was treated just the same as "+keyword", and that all the keywords are ANDed together. For example:
Search keywords Number of results rubio 63 rubio ayers 26 rubio ayers construction 12 Remember that the use of a soundex means that a large number of words are associated with a given word. For example, "ayers" matches "upstairs" on one of the pages because "airs" sounds just like "ayers"! Note that this feature is extremely helpful if you don't know how to spell Paul's last name, or any other of the many hard-to-spell names in the SGM such as "Sturtevant", "Chaney", or "Henninger".
It has become apparent that the only time Beseen updates their database is when I request them to do so. Hence be aware that a search will not find content added after the last date above. I'll try to remember to have them update their database every month. Here's a record of such updates, beginning on 3/26/00:
Search database updates Number of Pages Indexed Number of Words Indexed 26 March 2000 304 17,400 22 April 2000 311 17,300 13 July 2000 329 18,200 15 September 2000 138 12,000 19 September 2000 344 19,700 5 November 2000 344 19,700 31 December 2000 356 20,400 14 January 2001 368 20,500 I didn't catch the indexing error on 15 September until 19 September, so searches were incomplete for four days.
Note the decrease in words indexed from 3/26/00 to 4/22/00.
Beginning Sunday, 10/8/00, Beseen will begin reindexing this site weekly on Sundays at ~3:30 a.m. As seen above, the number of indexed pages and words has remained the same through 11/5/00, since I have added no new pages since then. However, a spot check for one search term shows that the ~40 pages modified since 9/19/00 have indeed been reindexed.
Search "Most tchester.org Pages" By Using Google
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Copyright © 1999-2001 by Tom Chester.
Permission is freely granted to reproduce any or all of this page as long as credit is given to me at this source:
http://tchester.org/sgm/site/search.html
Comments and feedback: Tom Chester
Updated 20 January 2001.