Table 1.

Performance of each source database used by the Taxonomic Search Engine. Each database was queried for 1000 taxonomic names taken at random from the 2004 edition of the Species 2000 CD-ROM. The table displays the number of times each database contained the name (n), and median, mean, standard deviation, and best and worst times taken for a database to respond to a query. The number of times a query failed to return a response is also recorded.

		Response time (in seconds)
Source	n	Median	Mean	StdDev	Best	Worst	Failed
ITIS	513	0.915	1.151	0.802	0.808	6.593	0
Index Fungorum	73	0.132	0.250	0.562	0.108	9.379	6
IPNI	153	0.356	1.055	3.264	0.143	59.653	20
uBio	887	0.295	0.384	0.544	0.259	8.710	0
NCBI	101	0.252	0.369	0.561	0.225	8.983	0