Known-Item Searching on the World Wide Web

With the explosion of the World Wide Web, numerous search engines have proliferated online, claiming to be the best, fastest, or most accurate. Though each product is slightly different from the others in its presentation and search architecture, what all are providing is keyword searching of the Web's millions of pages. However, there are circumstances, just like in a library catalog, where an individual may want to perform a known-item search rather than a keyword search. The purpose of this paper was to discover whether known-item searches are possible with some of the Web's most popular search engines, and if the results retrieved using such a search would be satisfactory to a user. The author tested and compared four major Web search engines, using the most sophisticated search techniques available. Thirty-nine sites were selected and searched by title, and ranked according to the relevance and order of the displayed results.