langreiter.com plain, simple: comment-2002-04-09-5

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comment-2002-04-09-5

CREATED BY David Ness • LAST EDITED BY David Ness 8395 days AGO

I wonder if Google would work as well on `my own stuff' as it would on the net as a whole. The reason I raise that question is that the value of Google, it seems to me, is for searches that are `close' but not exact. When searching a huge loosely connected pile `close' is real important. Buy `my stuff' is a much more narrow collection, and exact matches do better than they would across the net.

I have about 150G on my LAN, but a huge portion of it is not text (or image), it is code in various (binary) forms. I confess that I do use simple linear searches a lot, and this works well because I am a finatic about keeping original documents in ASCII. But searching through non-ASCII files (other than ZIPs) might be less productive for Google than it might be on the net (where I would guess things like code are a much smaller percentage of the information).