Finding a needle(or 7,079 pages on needles) on the Web....

Web Contents

A study by the NEC Research Institute says the Internet has exploded to more than 320 million Web pages, an estimate that does not include millions of pages that are protected by passwords or "search walls" that block access to browsers or search engines. The study indicates that the HotBot search engine has the most comprehensive index of the Web, but even so, covers only about 34 percent of the indexable pages. Coverage of some of the other search engines includes: AltaVista (28%); Northern Light (20%); Excite (14%); Lycos (3%). One of the report's coauthors says that the Web's data explosion may be better controlled by the "meta-search engines," such as Meta-Crawler and Ahoy!, which have developed thinking techniques that sense what readers are looking for and seek out pages not found on most indexes.

source: Associated Press - 3 April 1998