A common complaint against search engines is that they return too many pages, and that many of the pages have low relevance to the query. However, a search engine could be more comprehensive while still returning the same set of pages first. One of the main problems is that the search engines do not rank the relevance of results very well. These engines make greater use of the structure of Web pages and the graph formed by the links between pages in order to determine page relevancy. One of the main reasons behind the complaint that search engines return too many results is that Web users tend to make queries that result in poor precision.
Web users tend to make simple queries that can return thousands or millions of documents.
Unfortunately, ranking the relevance of these documents is a difficult problem, and the desired documents may not appear near the top of the list. Formulating a more precise query can be very helpful. More comprehensive and more relevant results may be possible using a search engine that specializes in a particular area. OpenText provides a search engine that indexes business sites. Because there are fewer pages to index, the engines may be able to be more comprehensive within their area, and may also be able to update the index more regularly.