Search Engines Sputtering

from the uphill-climb dept

An update to the Lawrence & Giles Web Searching paper is just out and the top search engine is....Northern Light, with 16% coverage of the searchable web, followed by Snap and AltaVista with 15.5% each. That's about half the previous fraction, in part because the web has expanded from 320M pages to 800M pages in the past year or so (hard to tell when exactly they ran the two searches). The article is in Nature, with blurb on the news wires. The researchers' site has a compendium of tips on searching (at all levels).