Searching the World Wide Web with Lycos and Infoseek

This paper evaluates the use of the Lycos and InfoSeek search tools for information discovery of the World Wide Web (WWW). It concentrates on a close comparison between the services offered by each of these tools; focusing on search interfaces and languages, collection size and content, quality and indexing issues and the increasing move towards commercialisation of tools on the WWW which are used for organising and cataloguing resources. The paper concludes that both of these search tools are able to produce results of some value when WWW searching and each has strengths and weaknesses in certain areas. Quality and indexing issues have yet to be successfully addressed by the current database creation strategies used by these tools.