The E-Sylum:  Volume 9, Number 51, December 17, 2006, Article 15

NUMISMATIC SEARCH ENGINE FEEDBACK

Bob Leonard writes: "Your new search engine gives some very peculiar
results.  For example, Dick Johnson claims to have provided 500 articles
to the E-Sylum alone, yet if you search for "Dick Johnson" very few
appear.  I searched under my own name and found hardly any of my
contributions--yet if you use "Lesher" as a search term, one of the
omitted items comes up (with Dick Johnson too), that doesn't appear
under my own name.  I don't understand this.

[Hmmm.  I tried Bob's examples, and he's right.  I'm not sure what's
going on.  Dick does have hundreds of articles in The E-Sylum archive,
but they're not coming up here.   He is referred to both as "Robert
Leonard" and "Bob Leonard", but searching in each of these and summing
the total still falls short.  I'll look into this.  Thanks for the
feedback!  -Editor]

Bob adds: "Incidentally, the Harry Bass Research Foundation has redone
their web search, and screwed it up badly.  It used to be a very valuable
search engine (like what you are attempting), but now it is extremely
erratic, with either no hits or way too many to be useful.

"Again, as a test I searched for my own name (since I know what a
complete list is), and was surprised to see one of my COAC papers
missing.  Searching under the title revealed that part of the title
had been coded as the "author."  Right now I think that the best
numismatic reference search (except commercial stuff such as you
include) is the ANS web site."

  Wayne Homren, Editor

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