The amount of publicly available information resources on the Web is increasing rapidly. As this trend continues, finding these resources becomes more difficult. Several systems, notably Archie, Jumpstation, Lycos, WebCrawler, RBSE Index, and Harvest have attempted to solve this problem by building indices and allowing users to search them.

These Web−wide indexing solutions do not, in practice, share information with each other. In addition, the databases often fail to provide users with specific or complete answers to their queries. 

This workshop has two goals: to find ways that index providers can share indexing and Web−structure information, and to explore ways to improve the query experience for users. Both goals stem from the need to address the increasing scale of the Internet: as the size of the problem increases, we need to be more efficient at building indices, and better at focusing on what the users are looking for. As we find solutions to these
problems, it will enable us to build more efficient, consistent, and powerful indices of the World−Wide Web.