Ah, I understand. You're wondering how they know if they found them all,
given the fact that there are millions of documents and no one really knows
what's in there. TREC deals with this by assuming that all of the relevant
documents will be found by one engine or another. It's not clear if Excite
follows this model or not. In any event, it's based on an assumption that
is far from proven, especially for huge Web collections.
In the end, "relevant" is completely a matter of opinion, anyway, so it's
difficult for anyone to objective assess any engine, much less their own.
Nick
---------------------------------------
Verity Inc.
Connecting People with Information
Product Manager, Categorization and Visualization
408-542-2164; home office 408-369-1233; fax 408-541-1600
http://www.verity.com
_________________________________________________
This messages was sent by the robots mailing list. To unsubscribe, send mail
to robots-request@webcrawler.com with the word "unsubscribe" in the body.
For more info see http://info.webcrawler.com/mak/projects/robots/robots.html