Seek and Ye Shall Find Online?

Cant keep up with the dizzying pace of Internet growth? Neither can your search engine. A new study from the NEC research institute says Excite, HotBot, Infoseek et al are barely able to cover one-third of the 320 million web pages estimated to be out there. The engines index only a fraction of the total number of documents on the Web, wrote researchers Steve Lawrence and Lee Giles in the journal Science. The coverage of any one engine is significantly limited.

Bottom of the class: Lycos, which is barely scratching the surface with coverage of about nine million web pages. Best browser award goes to HotBot, which has managed to catalog a third of the web, or around 100 million pages. But as Lawrence and Giles say, none of the engines match up to the searching power you get by using any two or three of them in conjunction. With the Internet set to hit a staggering 3 billion pages by the next century, its only going to become more true: If you want to become a better surfer, youve got to do your homework.