By Dominic Maher, 29 July 1999 00:15
NEWS Search engines have come under fire for not retrieving information from the whole Web - but according to Charles Walker, UK MD of Lycos, a selective approach is better for surfers. The NEC Research Institute recently found that coverage of the Web's pages by the top 11 engines has dropped from 60 per cent in 1997 to 42 per cent. Northern Light fared best, covering 16 per cent of the Web. But in an exclusive interview with Silicon.com, Walker claimed this doesn't matter. He said: "It's actually a good thing if you have a search engine that doesn't have 100 per cent of the Web pages out there, because a lot of them, quite frankly, are not worth looking at." Walker added that Lycos does a lot of the leg work for users, as his company's search engine will not list sites with broken links, or images which fail to download properly. "What we've done... is use computer technology to sift through the millions of Web sites worldwide and find the absolute best ones." The full interview with Charles Walker can be seen on Silicon.com's Internet Channel (http://www.silicon.com/web ).
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