Data from May 5, 1999

Based on an analysis of the same five very small searches used for the overlap analysis, this table shows 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. Times refers to how many times in the four searches a unique hit was found. Northern Light found unique hits on each search.

Given these results from this very small sample, Infoseek definitely found the most unique hits (18), but Northern Light and AltaVista found unique hits on all five searches. Infoseek also found twelve unique hits, but the majority (16) were on one search.

This example is from a total of 267 hits from four searches found by ten search engines. Of the 267 total hits, 122 were unique Web pages. Of those, 26 were dead links.

See also the March 1999 Unique Hits Report and the Jan. 1999 Unique Hits Report

While decisions about which Web search engine to use should not be based on size alone, this information is especially important when looking for very specific keywords, phrases, and areas of specialized interest. See also the following statistical analyses:

• Relative Size of the search engines
• Total Size Estimate
• Overlap between the search engines
• Dead Links comparison
• Change Over Time