Re: I am being interviewed by OReilly

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"  :-)

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Robert L Mathews, Tiger Technologies