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NUA INTERNET SURVEYS NUA INTERNET SURVEYS NUA INTERNET SURVEYS
Weekly free email on what's new in surveys on the Internet
By Nua Email: [log in to unmask] Web: http://www.nua.ie/surveys/
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July 13th 1999 Published By: Nua Limited Volume 4 No. 27
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EDITORIAL - Members Only - Sorcha Ni hEilidhe
<http://www.nua.ie/surveys/analysis/weekly_editorial.html>
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Perhaps this is common knowledge but I personally find it intriguing
that the biggest search engines on the Web still only index
less than one tenth of the Web. I have a fundamental problem with the
perpetuation of the virtual myth that the Web is growing at such a rate
that search engines cannot come up with ways to track the growth.

The long and short of it is that search engines can't be bothered
indexing the other 90 percent of the Web for the simple reason that
it's not commercially viable for them to do so. That's a fair enough
reason but it 

The sites most likely to be found on a search engine or a directory are
US-based, commercial and highly trafficked. These are the very sites
who spend millions on their marketing budgets and are least in need of
the additional endorsement of being listed on a search engine.

If a huge organisation like Yahoo! can only get it together to index
7.4 percent of the Web then isn't' it time we stopped referring to it
as a search engine and start thinking of it as a members only
commercial online country club. If you've got the cash, you're in.

In fairness to Yahoo!, they never call themselves a search engine or
directory and in their press material they describe what they do
carefully:  "Yahoo! contains organized information on tens of thousands
of computers linked to the Web."
<http://docs.yahoo.com/info/misc/history.html>.

Two scientists from the NEC Research Institute in Princeton carried out
a study on the Net's loudest search engines and found that not only do
they not index the best part of the Net but they are most likely to
index commercial over educational, US over European and popular over
relatively unknown.

For the full article please see:
<http://www.nua.ie/surveys/analysis/weekly_editorial.html>

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SEARCH TOOLS:
Archives: <http://www.nua.ie/surveys/index.cgi?f=FS&cat_id=29>
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CNN Interactive: Search Engines Only Index One Sixth of Web

The extent of the Internet which is indexed by search engines is 
diminishing rapidly according to a new study by NEC Research Institute 
in Princeton, New Jersey.  The 1998 study found that one third of the 
Web was covered by search engines, now only one sixth of the Web is 
covered.

The study found that Northern Light had the largest proportion of the 
Web indexed however this was found to be only 16 percent of the Web. 
Last year Hotbot were the largest search engine and they had 34 percent 
of the Net covered. 

In a study of 11 search engines Northern Light was followed by Snap with 
15.5 percent of the Web covered, Altavista also with 15.5 percent, 
Hotbot with 11.3 percent, Microsoft with 8 percent, Infoseek with 8 
percent, Google with 7.8 percent, Yahoo with 7.4 percent, Excite with 
5.6 percent, Lycos with 2.5 percent and Euroseek with 2.2 percent.

The study found that on average it takes a new site 6 months to be 
indexed on a search engine. The study suggested that the cost of 
maintaining ever larger databases was the reason why search engines had 
relatively low amounts of content indexed. 

According to Steve Lawrence and C. Lee Giles, authors of the study, 800 
million pages of the Web are now searchable. In 1997 that figure as 320 
million.

<http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9907/08/search.engines.ap/>


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