The DOI matches its Crossref record.
Searching the World Wide Web
Abstract
The coverage and recency of the major World Wide Web search engines was analyzed, yielding some surprising results. The coverage of any one engine is significantly limited: No single engine indexes more than about one-third of the “indexable Web,” the coverage of the six engines investigated varies by an order of magnitude, and combining the results of the six engines yields about 3.5 times as many documents on average as compared with the results from only one engine. Analysis of the overlap between pairs of engines gives an estimated lower bound on the size of the indexable Web of 320 million pages.
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Citations
Cited by
Emergence of Scaling in Random Networks
Barabási, A.-L., & Albert, R. (1999) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.286.5439.509 · Cited by 36,135
Statistical mechanics of complex networks
Albert, R., & Barabási, A.-L. (2002) · Reviews of Modern Physics · doi:10.1103/revmodphys.74.47 · Cited by 20,471
Dorogovtsev, S. N., & Mendes, J. F. F. (2002) · Advances in Physics · doi:10.1080/00018730110112519 · Cited by 3,171
Evolution of the social network of scientific collaborations
Barabási, A. L., Jeong, H., Néda, Z., Ravasz, E., Schubert, A., & Vicsek, T. (2002) · Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications · doi:10.1016/s0378-4371(02)00736-7 · Cited by 1,972
Scholarly communication and bibliometrics
Borgman, C. L., & Furner, J. (2002) · Annual Review of Information Science and Technology · doi:10.1002/aris.1440360102 · Cited by 1,121
Metadata
- Authors
- Lawrence, S., & Giles, C. L.
- Venue
- Science
- Published
- 1998-04-03
- Volume
- 280
- Issue
- 5360
- Pages
- 98-100
- ISSN
- 0036-8075 (ISSN-L)
- 1095-9203
- OpenAlex
- W2147164982
- Cited by
- 969
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 274.58
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
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- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Searching the World Wide Web. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1126/science.280.5360.98
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- Lawrence, S., & Giles, C. L. (1998). Searching the World Wide Web. Science. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.280.5360.98
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
