AltaVista, with the largest number of returns, provided the a relevant site right at the top. While AltaVista provided the most relevant results in these two examples, it does not mean that AltaVista is the best search engine. It just happened to provide the best results on these two examples. Part II will discuss ways to narrow searches so fewer web sites are returned and relevant sites appear near the top of the results list more often-no matter which search engine you are using. Directories A directory, such as Yahoo, is created by humans.
Web designers submit their sites and suggest categorical placements.
Directory employees review the submissions, determine which categories are appropriate, and then finally add the sites to their listings. This human interaction often translates into more accurate results while having significantly fewer entries. Yahoo has approximately 750,000 entries, compared to the 50 million plus entries of Hotbot, Excite, and AltaVista. It also takes longer for a site to be listed. Again, a search of Yahoo for Charlotte's Web returned 11 web sites, none of which had relevant information.