What you see is not always what you get when it comes to search engines. For example, when you run a search and get 1.2 million hits, you think "Wow, that's a lot of links!" You will never see 1.2 million hits at one time, even if you were willing to try to scroll through that many. Most major search engines restrict your actual list or results to 1,000. According to Sullivan's Search Engine Watch, AlltheWeb and its owner Yahoo! are the only search tools that will let you get more than 1,000 results. Most directories limit displayed results to 199.
Why do they limit the displays? Why do they claim to show much more? It comes down to the economics of running a website. The more frequently a search engine database is updated, the more reliable its results will be. Frequent updates cost a lot of money, so more and more, how good a search tool is can depend on how much money its owners are putting into it, and how good its supporting partners are. Most of the major search engines claim to index 500 million documents. AlltheWeb indexes 3.15 billion pages, it claims. Google claims a collection of 6 billion items, including 4.28 billion web pages, 880 million images, 845 million Usenet messages, and a growing collection of book-related information pages.
So, the big numbers are meant to lure you into believing they have the most comprehensive databases, but knowing that no one will actually go through a million hits, search engines save time, money, and bandwidth by only serving a up a portion of those results. However, even those claims to the number of "indexed pages" can be questioned. Greg Notess, the search engine expert who runs tests to determine the accuracy of search tool's claims about size, puts the numbers closer to one billion, not three billion or 4.28 billion. He notes that the search engines list how many documents they have found, not how many they have indexed. Whatever the numbers, the search engines have gotten much better at finding information. They are much more accurate and much more sophisticated in how they do their jobs. That means you have a better chance of finding what you are looking for.
Initially search engine sites were not concerned about profitably, believing that after they established a loyal following, the money would follow from advertisers and other commercial ventures. However, the great lesson of the dot-com crash of 2000 was that companies need to have a profitable business base to survive on the Internet. Many search engines have come and gone, others survive simply as shells of their former selves. There is still room for growth in the search tool market. A few new search tools - Teoma, Gigablast and WiseNut - show great promise.
The search tools market is an ever-changing landscape as companies thrive and fail, expand through acquisition or disappear altogether without so much as a blip. Excite, Go.com and Infoseek (both owned by Disney), iWon, NBCi, are no longer powerhouse search engine leaders, if they are around at all. Included in the recent search engine casualty list are Inference Find, Magellan, and Sawysearcher. Many of the meta-search tools have also died or been bought out or merged with other ones. For example, Dogpile is one of four metasearch tools (allied with Excite, Webcrawler and Metacrawler) operated by Infospace, which all use the same underlying technology but maintain their own unique searching interfaces.
The biggest loss to researchers was the announcement in 2002 that Northern Light had been sold to Divine Inc., which provides content management and delivery solutions to business customers. Worse news was that Northern Light was closing as a free public search tool. Its database was the fourth largest searchable database. Luckily, Northern Light's auto-classification technique is now being used by newcomers Teoma and WiseNut, and another meta-search tool to watch, Vivisimo. In the constantly-shifting world of search tools, 2003 brought about another round of mergers and the continued bottom-line reality that making money is the way to stay in business. Google went out and bought several technology companies, including Sprinks, a paid listings service that was owned by Primedia, also Applied Semantics, a company that provides domain name, contextual advertising, enterprise search solutions, including natural language searching technology. Google also acquired Pyra Labs, the company behind the popular Blogger weblog creation tool and Blogspot, a weblog hosting service. These acquisitions came in anticipation of Google's widelyanticipated initial public offering which occurred at the end of April, 2004.
Meanwhile, Yahoo!, which moved from a subject directory to a crawler-based search engine in 2002, also went on a buying spree, purchasing the Inktomi database as well as Overture, the leader in paid placement searching - a major revenue source. In the process, Yahoo! also became the owner of AlltheWeb and AltaVista, which Overture had bought earlier in the year. That, plus a series of additional acquisitions, puts Yahoo! in the position of being the primary rival to Google for search engine dominance.
Not to be outdone, Microsoft spent huge amounts of money to build its own search engine. With its dominance in office and personal software and its control of the Internet Explorer browser, Microsoft is positioning itself to be a major player in the search world. There are other major players in the search world. First to come to mind is AOL, which owns Netscape and the Open Directory. The Open Directory is also used by Google and many other search tools. Second is Ask Jeeves, which owns the Teoma search engine.
Another star on the rise is Gigablast, a high quality search engine built and operated by a sole proprietor, Matt Wells, who once worked for Infoseek. It is one of the newest players on the scene, and has a sizeable database and a useful search site. Lycos, which owns HotBot (formerly a search engine and now a meta-search tool) and Direct Hit are still active players in the search business. There is also WiseNut, owned by LookSmart, the human-powered directory. Together, WiseNut and LookSmart have been heralded as the "next Google," but to date the company has simply been a second tier contender in the search engine wars.
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