Re: I am being interviewed by OReilly

Wow, cool, I didn't realize that ... but, interesting enough, if you do
just:

postgresql statistics gathering

or

postgres statistics gathering

the two first links contain *only* postgresql, so its gotta be pulling a
substring in from *somewhere* ...


On Tue, 9 Jul 2002, Robert L Mathews wrote:

> At 7/9/02 11:09 AM, Marc G. Fournier wrote:
>
> >I'm sorry, but someones lame argument about 'whether to
> >search for postgres or postgresql'... like, come on ... if you have any
> >doubt, just search for postgres, it *is* a sub-string of the formal name
>
> Hmmm? Most search engines do not treat substrings in this manner. Try the
> following two searches on Google:
>
> statistics gathering postgresql damond walker
> statistics gathering postgres damond walker
>
> The latter search does not return any matches, while the first does.
> (Obviously, the reverse is also true -- searching for "postgresql" won't
> show you matches of pages that only mention "postgres".) In general, if
> you do two searches on "postgres" and "postgresql", the results are quite
> different, usually in the opposite direction from which you suggested:
> you get more hits for "postgresql".
>
> This effect makes searches difficult for PostgreSQL users, and makes the
> software appear less popular to people doing searches on only one term,
> especially "postgres" (or, heaven forbid, "postgre"). The name MySQL, for
> example, does not have this drawback, although I suppose some people
> might search for "my sql" and have a similar problem.
>
> Perhaps you consider this a trivial effect, but it is real and I have
> often found results for obscure problems with one search and not the
> other, so I don't think my original comment was "lame"  :-)
>
> ------------------------------------
> Robert L Mathews, Tiger Technologies
>
>
> ---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
> TIP 3: if posting/reading through Usenet, please send an appropriate
> subscribe-nomail command to majordomo@postgresql.org so that your
> message can get through to the mailing list cleanly
>