There have been many attempts to study the content of the web, either through human or automatic agents. Five different previously used web survey methodologies are described and analysed, each justifiable in its own right, but a simple experiment is presented that demonstrates concrete differences between them. The concept of crawling the web also bears further inspection, including the scope of the pages to crawl, the method used to access and index each page, and the algorithm for the identification of duplicate pages. The issues involved here will be well-known to many computer scientists but, with the increasing use of crawlers and search engines in other disciplines, they now require a public discussion in the wider research community. This paper concludes that any scientific attempt to crawl the web must make available the parameters under which it is operating so that researchers can, in principle, replicate experiments or be aware of and take into account differences between methodologies. A new hybrid random page selection methodology is also introduced.

The use of the World Wide Web by UK independent breweries: global reach or global invisibility? Both the Campaign for Real Ale and the Society of Independent Brewers hold that barriers to market access disadvantage small brewers in the UK. This leads naturally to consideration of whether the Internet can provide small breweries with a means of bypassing the distribution channels controlled by the major breweries, the pubcos, the supermarkets and the off-licence chains, and also of reaching international markets. This paper surveys the population of small breweries in the UK to ascertain their Web site usage. It finds that only a minority of independent breweries support a Web site. It develops two different measures of web site visibility and finds that far from having global reach many of the independent brewery Web sites display low visibility. It suggests strategies for small breweries in particular, and for small businesses in general, to improve the visibility of their Web sites and concludes by indicating avenues for further research. 1.