Date: Tue, 7 Jan 2003 23:32:37 -0500 (EST) From: "Keith F. Lynch" <kfl at keithlynch.net> Subject: [WSFA] John(s) Hopkin(s), newsgroups, and Google To: WSFAlist at keithlynch.net Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net> ronkean at juno.com wrote: > I get 705,000 hits for John Hopkins University (not in quotes), and > 80,800 for "John Hopkins University" (phrase in quotes). "Johns > Hopkins University" (in quotes) gives 764,000, and Johns Hopkins > University (not in quotes) yields 931,000 hits. You're obviously doing a web search, not a newsgroup search. Without the quotes, it finds any page containing all of the words in any order, which isn't very interesting here. For web searches (with quotes), I get: "Johns Hopkins University". 715,000 "John Hopkins University". 79,700 "Johns Hopkin University" 229 "John Hopkin University" 305 >> ... New York fan Seth Breidbart is the person who formally defined >> newsgroup spam for purposes of determining what should be canceled. >> Look up "Breidbart Index".) > That seems to be an index of 'excessive multiple posting' within a > 45 day period. It's a weighted combination of multiple posting and cross-posting, the latter being considered not as bad. The definition is completely content-neutral. Whether something is considered spam has nothing whatsoever to do with whether it's commercial or off-topic or fraudulent, but only with how much of it there is. > But my own web page has been up for nearly a year, and google has > apparently not indexed it. Do any other pages have pointers to it? Google has to be able to find it somehow. As I've mentioned, Google has never indexed the web pages which contain the archives of this list. That's because there are no pointers to those pages. The URL was mentioned in a WSFA Journal, but I snipped it out of the online version of that Journal, since the consensus was to keep the archives private, and that's the only way to do so. > I had thought that google searches for phrases in quotes would seach > for the exact phrase only, case insensitive, but it seems that in > this case the elves at google have set it up so a search for "John > Hopkins University" also includes results for "Johns Hopkins > University". Not always, since otherwise the former would have had the same or more hits than the latter. But Google is definitely doing something, since all four searches find http://www.jhu.edu/, which definitely does not contain the singular John or Hopkin, not even in hidden comments or meta tags. Following up on the questions of newsgroup volume, I decided to track mentions of "Worldcon" by year. There's one every year, and it's been of roughly constant size for the past quarter century, so variations in how much it's mentioned ought to track total newsgroup volume. Or rather, the fannish subset of it. Or at least that part which has been archived. Or something. Anyhow, here are the numbers: 2002 4240 2001 6720 2000 4720 1999 4220 1998 42400 1997 4340 1996 5630 1995 2790 1994 1880 1993 2210 1992 576 1991 441 1990 279 1989 159 1988 2 1987 3 1986 22 1985 26 1984 25 1983 35 1982 21 1981 4 It would appear that 1987 and 1988 were poorly archived, since the volume of discussion certainly didn't decrease. 1998's number is wildly out of proportion. When I tried to pin it down, it shrank. By halves, 1998 had 2440 and 8170 postings containing "Worldcon", not 42,400. By quarters, 1070, 1370, 7510, and 664. I guess I ran into one of the rare bugs in Google. (Much of the third quarter excess is due to a rec.arts.sf.fandom thread with 2940 posts, whose subject line contained "Weapons at Worldcon". That's not what was actually talked about, except during the first few postings. People reply and don't bother to change the subject line, even long after the topic has changed, and branched, and changed again.) The earliest online fandom wasn't in the newsgroups, but in the SF-LOVERS email list, whose archives have survived intact since September 1979. On that list Worldcon was mentioned 47 times in 1980, 25 times in 1981, and 22 times in 1982. The first mention of Worldcon was on April 25th 1980. Curiously, the first mention of Disclave was the previous day, April 24th 1980! -- Keith F. Lynch - kfl at keithlynch.net - http://keithlynch.net/ I always welcome replies to my e-mail, postings, and web pages, but unsolicited bulk e-mail (spam) is not acceptable. Please do not send me HTML, "rich text," or attachments, as all such email is discarded unread.