Some search engines index only a portion of each document, and some engines even claim to have indexed a web site when in fact all they've indexed is the address. Full text indexing provides a comprehensive catalog of the Web's contents and enables more accurate searches by providing a larger source from which to draw information. Concept-based searching Most search engines depend on keyword searching whereby results of a search are deciphered simply by the occurrence of the words in the query. The result is that Excite places the pages you're really interested in at the top of your result list. Automatic abstracting Excite uses its unique summarization technology on every one of the millions of documents in its database.
Most search engines use the first few sentences of the document as a summary.
But Excite gives you an abstract that tells you what the document is really about. So you've found the perfect page, and now you want more. Most other search engines would make you re-type your query, manually picking out terms to describe your document. Excite is the only search engine that gives you the flexibility to perform the search either way, with stemming on or stemming off. A really long hit list isn't useful if most of the documents are copies of each other.