There's just too much stuff on the Net and too many people trying to beat the system for search engines to be reliable. Princeton, N.J-based NEC Research came out with a study in July that concluded that not all websites are indexed equally. Some aren't even looked at for months at a time, and even the best search engine indexes only about 16 percent of the Web. Larry Page and Servey Brin spent three years at Stanford developing what they think is a way out of the problem. Then it counts the number of other web pages that point to each page.
Extra credit is given if another high-importance page points to a page.
Then Google spits out a results page, including excerpts from each page that include the keywords in the query. Usually the search engine lives up to its expectations, which means it is getting a growing cult following against names like Altavista, Excite, and Lycos. The problem every search engine faces is that no computer can understand context clues well enough to point someone in the right direction all the time. Instead, one often has to find an online guide somewhere to locate all the details on hypoglycemia or pinewood derbies or Keanu Reeves. Eventually, a permanent solution must be found-and someone who finds the way out of this mess can find an easy billion.