The Little Search Engines that Couldn't

Staff -- School Library Journal, 9/1/1999

No search tool covers the Web anywhere near comprehensively, according to the results of a new study published in Nature. Northern Light surpassed all other Net search tools for sheer coverage, but its database includes only 16 percent of all existing Web sites, according to computer scientists Steve Lawrence and C. Lee Giles of the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, NJ. Yahoo!, most students' favorite search took, managed to search only 7.4 percent of all sites.

As of February, the scientists calculated that the Web had 800 million searchable pages. For a summary of the Nature article visit www.wwwmetrics.com.