Re: REF: Iris-specific search engine

On Nov 23, 2006, at 5:15 AM, Steve Szabo wrote:


I was going to reply similarly to Laurie's message, but thought then
that I should not rain on her parade.
Thanks, Steve. I appreciate your not wanting to discourage me in my efforts with Shadowood's Iris Search. 


It is a laudable effort, but not
without its own pitfalls, as she has noted.
The pitfalls are large at this point in time, but they should be diminishing substantially fairly soon. In researching the problems with Google's Custom Search Engines, I now understand the following:
1) The CSE's (of which Shadowood's Iris Search is one) do NOT currently search any pages on any submitted sites that Google itself has designated as "Supplemental Result". Apparently Google maintains two separate indexes into which it categorizes specific web pages at its own discretion - the main index and the supplemental index. It is not uncommon for a site to have only one or two of its pages included in the main index, while the rest are relegated to the supplemental index, making those pages currently unsearchable by the CSE's.
2) You can determine which of your website's pages are in the main index and which are in the supplemental index by going to http://www.google.com and typing in the following search term:
site:yoursitename (for example, the AIS website would be searched with the term 
 site:www.irises.org)
The results will be those pages on your site that Google has indexed. The pages that are in the supplemental index (rather than the main index), will include the words "Supplemental Result" after the URL.
3) Google is currently working on figuring out how to include pages from the supplemental index into CSE searches and anticipates being able to do so in a few weeks (which will make Shadowood's Iris Search MUCH more useful!).
4) Convincing Google to index your site so that all of your site's pages end up in the main index seems to be a mysterious process shrouded in guesswork and speculation. One of the primary recommendations for convincing Google of your pages' merit is to have them linked to and by as many other content-related sites as possible. In other words, we should all have our iris-related sites linked to each other! 


One
that may help members of this group who are into the genetics of iris,
and other such research would probably be Scirus (http://www.scirus.com) 
which searches mostly scientific literature.
Thank you for pointing me to Scirus. I'll be using it to locate iris-related literature to put into Shadowood's Iris Search. 

Laurie

---------------
lauriefr@localnet.com
http://www.geocities.com/lfandjg
http://lfrazer.com/iris/index.html
USDA zone 3b, AHS zone 4 - northern Minnesota
normal annual precipitation 26-27"
slightly acid, potassium deficient, clay soil

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