Alta Vista, Excite and Infoseek shared the upper cluster, while Hotbot was not significantly higher than Lycos. It is clear looking at the data that, in general, Alta Vista, Excite, and Infoseek did a superior job delivering quality relevance. Alta Vista did its best in experiment one, then slipped relative to Excite and Infoseek in the higher categories. In retrospect, for experiments two and three, it is entirely possible that Alta Vista might have done better in the higher categories if we had employed its proximity operators to explicitly order a closer relation. This point is well worth considering when searching Alta Vista.
Further research needs to be done in that area.
Infoseek suffered from a low but naggingly persistent level of inactive links, which may be why it did significantly worse in experiment one, but it managed to score well anyway when pages that were judged relevant but not useful were penalized. Indeed, it ran away with the clear first place in the arid environment of experiment three. See Table B6b in Appendix B for the medians, means and modes of the inactive links, the duplicate links and the category zero links for each service. Hotbot suffered from duplicates. Yet, even when they were neutralized, it was still significantly lower than the top services.