Retriever differs from such schemes in filtering out low value content and by making obscure sources visible.
unlike a search engine, rather than returning ranked documents links in response to a query, Lycos Retriever categorizes and disambiguates topics, collects documents on the Web relevant to the disambiguated sense of that topic, extracts paragraphs and images from these documents and arranges these into a coherent summary report or background briefing on the topic at something like the level of the first draft of a Wikipedia 2 article.