Data from search engine analysis run on Jan. 5, 1999

Based on an analysis of the same four very small searches used for the overlap analysis, the following table shows the number of total hits and the number and percent of unique hits for each search engine. Unique hits were those URLs that were found by only one of the ten search engines. None of the unique hits were dead links, but to get the percentage of unique hits, the number of dead links were subtracted from the total hits.

Given these results from this very small sample, Northern Light definitely found the most unique hits (12) on the most number (4). Infoseek also found twelve unique hits, but the majority were on one search and only one unique hit was found on any of the others.

This example is from a total of 173 hits from four searches found by ten search engines Of the 173 total hits, 83 were unique Web pages. Of those, 10 were dead links. All 10 dead links were included in more than one search engine database. As seen on the overlap page, 34 of the 83 unique Web pages were unique hits (found by only one of the 10 search engines).

See also statistics on search engine size, the lack of overlap between the search engines, dead links, and the change over time.