Since its inception, the World Wide Web has grown at a staggering rate. As a result, finding information on the Web is often difficult. To address this problem, search services such as WebCrawler[8] and Lycos [7] were created which use robots to collect information and index it at one place, and directory services such as Yahoo were created using human editors to organize and categorize Web pages. Both types of services make it easier for users to find the information they need. These services are also very popular as people like going to one place and discovering the information they want. Several other services have also recently emerged, such as AltaVista[1] and HotBot[5], which are attempting to form the most up-to-date and complete index of the Web.
A common belief is that the majority of Web search services are roughly the same. They all index the same content, and all use reasonable Information Retrieval (IR) techniques to map a query to potentially relevant URLs. Our experiments suggest otherwise.