Searching the web: Can you find what you want?

The World Wide Web has revolutionized communication and information distribution, storage, and access. Its impact has been felt everywhere - e.g. science and technology, commerce and business, education, government, religion, law, entertainment, health care. Even so, there are many ways the web can be improved. We discuss what the web consists of and how it has changed, what is the size of the web, and what is covered. Results for the publicly indexable web show that the web though Terabytes in size and growing is still less than large commercial databases and the Library of Congress. Though the web started out as an academic-government endeavor, it is now primarily commerce. Furthermore, the major web search engines cover only a fraction of the publicly indexable web and appear to base their indexing strategy on the popularity of information. Since current search on the web is primarily done with the search engines, what would be the economic, political and scientific implications of these results?