Anomalous and unreliable database behavior

[Garson O'Toole]

Fred Shapiro wrote:
> Excellent searching, Garson!  When I searched Newspaperarchive this morning, I did not get this to come up, indeed I couldn't get any hits for "fish needs a bicycle" or "fish without a bicycle."  What is it with that database?

All the major text databases that I have used are aggravatingly
unreliable in my experience. Sometimes the behavior is inexplicable.

Here is an example with Google Books. The following link goes to a
webpage for the book "Memoirs of an Amnesiac" by Oscar Levant within
the Google Books archive. But the actual database slot is filled with
an unrelated play "Children, Children" by Jack Horrigan:

http://books.google.com/books?id=IRhm9yi7gnIC&q=Horrigan#v=snippet&

This will probably be corrected over time, and the link will go
somewhere else, or the play "Children, Children" will be replaced with
something else.

I do not wish to be overly critical. The Google Books team is
constructing a fantastic resource, and the search functionality is
superior to most databases in my opinion. Also, I sometimes have very
positive experiences with the responsiveness of the Google research
team when I submit feedback. Recently, a document I inquired about was
made available in "full view" instead of "snippet view".

Garson

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