Table 3. Number of hits contributed by each search engine.
| Search engines | Breast cancer | Brustkrebs | Mammakarzinom |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lycos | 3170 | 4000 | 510 |
| Fast Search | 2500 | 2270 | 999 |
| Hotbot | 1035 | 996 | 278 |
| Altavista | 1000 | 1000 | 798 |
| Excite | 1000 | 53 | 31 |
| Webcrawler | 1000 | 54 | 2 |
| CompuServe | 980 | 941 | n/a |
| 861 | 535 | 567 | |
| Looksmart | 785 | 0 | 0 |
| AOL | 625 | 0 | 0 |
| Open Directory Project | 505 | 0 | 1 |
| EuroSeek | 500 | 500 | 500 |
| Netscape Netcenter | 500 | 6 | 1 |
| Yahoo! | 340 | 0 | 0 |
| MSN | 192 | 195 | 193 |
| NBCi | 134 | 135 | 135 |
| Direct Hit | 12 | 14 | 18 |
| Goto.com | 0 | 0 | 138 |
| Total | 15 139 | 10 699 | 4171 |
| Doublets removed | 8335 | 11 058a | |
| Unique hits provided by the search engines | 6804 | 3812a | |
| Relevant web pages included in the study | 1888 | 2702 | |
| Corresponding web projects | 132 | 65 |
All search engines results pages were pooled and the doublets were removed (‘n/a’: not available).
a
Hits returned for ‘Brustkrebs’ and ‘Mammakarzinom’ were pooled before further analysis.