Web searches only turn up a fraction of the relevant documents on the
Web—and many of those links are out of date. Steve Lawrence, at the NEC
Research Institute in Princeton, New Jersey, and his colleagues studied the
performance of six major search engines (Science, vol 280, p 98). The
researchers found that the worst performer, Lycos, only found 3 per cent of the
relevant pages on the Web. The best was HotBot, which turned up 34 per cent of
pages.
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