He said: "It's actually a good thing if you have a search engine that doesn't have 100 per cent of the Web pages out there, because a lot of them, quite frankly, are not worth looking at. Walker added that Lycos does a lot of the leg work for users...
Also stoking up the new economy is IDG Ventures Europe, a recently formed European venture capital fund put together by IDG, the company that made a fortune from publishing mind numbingly detailed statistics about how companies use IT.
It also claims its search engine can be maintained by just one member of staff compared with five or six for Ask Jeeves. A Californian start-up is planning to swipe corporate customers from Ask Jeeves in a battle of the natural language search...
Google may not be worried by Microsoft's threatened foray into the search arena but it seems the frat-boys-made-good might just be losing sleep over another entrant into the market - adult search engine Booble.com.
Amazon.com has quietly launched a test version of its long-awaited search engine, aiming to challenge industry stalwarts Google and Yahoo! The test version of A9's search engine offers web surfers new variations on other popular search tools.
The tool uses a linguistic engine which analyses the meaning of words and the construction of phrases and sentences to work out exactly what a user is hunting for. FactSpotter also recognises concepts in a search term.