Searching the world wide web

Steve Lawrence, C. Lee Giles

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

706 Scopus citations

Abstract

The coverage and recency of the major World Wide Web search engines was analyzed, yielding some surprising results. The coverage of any one engine is significantly limited: No single engine indexes more than about one-third of the 'indexable Web,' the coverage of the six engines investigated varies by an order of magnitude, and combining the results of the six engines yields about 3.5 times as many documents on average as compared with the results from only one engine. Analysis of the overlap between pairs of engines gives an estimated lower bound on the size of the indexable Web of 320 million pages.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)98-100
Number of pages3
JournalScience
Volume280
Issue number5360
DOIs
StatePublished - Apr 3 1998

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • General

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