ALIWEB does not have a web-searching robot. Instead, webmasters of participating sites post their own index information for each page they want listed. The advantage to this method is that users get to describe their own site, and a robot doesn't run about eating up Net bandwidth. Unfortunately, the disadvantages of ALIWEB are more of a problem today. The primary disadvantage is that a special indexing file must be submitted. Most users do not understand how to create such a file, and therefore they don't submit their pages. This leads to a relatively small database, which meant that users are less likely to search ALIWEB than one of the large bot-based sites. This Catch-22 has been somewhat offset by incorporating other databases into the ALIWEB search, but it still does not have the mass appeal of search engines such as Yahoo! or Lycos.