It is surprisingly difficult to get your pages listed properly in search engines . I have had tremendous difficulty in getting search engines like Hotbot and Yahoo to list my pages no matter how often I have submitted my URLs to these search engines. Other search engines give my pages a puzzling priority in the results listings. Often it is not. Although times have improved in 1998, it has taken weeks or months to get a page listed after I submitted it.
Pages can also fall out of the search engine database for a number of reasons.
As a result, I feel that search engine results are too often outdated and routinely leave out excellent sites of which I am already aware. Search engines generally do not lead you directly to the best sites. Search engines use a variety of algorithms to help you hone your search request and other advanced techniques are available, but there's nothing like a fanatic's or expert's page on any subject to the get you to the best pages and the best information. Constructing good search requests for general topics is very, very difficult. Here's a recent example.