On the Hunt Returning Members, Sign In. Sign in automatically next time Search Student. They're not all the same, a new survey says. It's midnight and you're doing research for a paper. You type your topic into a search engine, but it returns no hits.
Frustration sets in.
Not all search engines are the same, and none of them are complete, a new study that rates search sites says. The study showed that HotBot and AltaVista provided the most returns on sample subjects. The researchers, who work at the NEC Institute in Princeton, N.J., conducted the study over a three-day period in December. The study also measured the number of links that didn't work because they were outdated, broken or simply not responding. They found that Lycos had the fewest broken links while HotBot had the most.