Performance of Four World Wide Web (WWW) Index Services: Infoseek, Lycos, Webcrawler and WWWWorm

Authors

H. Vernon Leighton, Winona State UniversityFollow

Files

Description

This document is the 1996 revised version of my first precision study of Web Search Engines. The study was done as part of a graduate course at the University of Minnesota in the spring of 1995 under Professor John Riedl. The first edition of this study was important: it was even used as evidence in a patent dispute trial among Silicon Valley corporations in subsequent years. According to Google Scholar (as of 17 December 2025), the revised version of this study has been cited 67 times in the scholarly literature. This revision was motivated by an emailed complaint by Steve Kirsch, who was the CEO of the Search Engine company Infoseek, over the initial version posted to the Web in 1995. The debate over protocols helped inform my more statistically valid precision study in 1997.

Publication Date

6-25-1996

Publisher

Winona State University

Location

Winona, Minnesota

Keywords

Precision (Information retrieval); Information retrieval; Search engines; World Wide Web; Internet; Technology

Department

Library

Comments

Citation: Leighton, H. Vernon. Performance of Four World Wide Web (WWW) Index Services: Infoseek, Lycos, Webcrawler and WWWWorm. Revised edition. Posted on the web 25 June 1996.

Recommended Citation

Leighton, H. Vernon, "Performance of Four World Wide Web (WWW) Index Services: Infoseek, Lycos, Webcrawler and WWWWorm" (1996). Library Faculty Works. 9.
https://openriver.winona.edu/libraryfacultyworks/9