Search and the Three Engines

“Did you know that only 1,1 percent of the top results of the four leading search engines are the same.” This text is from a banner on the first page of dogpile.com. That is a search engine that compares the results of the other (three) search engines. This simple comparison is one of my own on the subject, focused on the word "search". The three search engines return each more than a billion results:

1. MSN 1,164,314,650 results containing "search".
2. Yahoo about 5,010,000,000
3. Google about 16.010.000.000

People search for the word "search" 1,784,324 times a month (Overture, keyword selector tool, June 2006). And either of the three engines will deliver quite a different result:

MSN fetched the following two sites as the first ones: Search.com (1) and Search.org (2)

The rest of the search result on the first page consists of: searchengineshowdown.com/search.shtml (a search engine users guide), www.greatbuildings.com/search.html, www.hplovecraft.com/about/search.asp, www.pandia.com/searchworld/detective.html, www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/MetaSearch.html, www.nngroup.com/reports/ecommerce/search.html, and www.webdesignpractices.com/functions/search.html

Yahoo retrieved the comparison site a one of the first results, the next one is a normal search engine: www.dogpile.com (1) and www.altavista.com (2) The rest of the first page is covered by: www.hotbot.com, www.webcrawler.com, www.lycos.com, www.alltheweb.com, www.metacrawler.com, www.google.com, search.yahoo.com and www.ask.com.

Then Google: search.msn.com (1) and www.zvon.org/search.php (2). www.google.com/, search.yahoo.com, www.altavista.com/, www.yahoo.com, search.aol.com/, www.imdb.com/search, search.netscape.com/ and www.excite.com/ are the other search results of the first page.

Some conclusions – for this situation;

You often hear that an URL should be keyword rich. MSN is the only search engine that uses rich keyword as their prime selection criteria; search.com and search.org are found because of the keyword in the URL. If you look at the second site (search.org) you will find out that the site has little to do with (general) searching.

The relevance of google’s second find (zvon a search engine focused on XML) seems to come out of the blue. The First choice for MSN fits their -- be no evil -- style; they appoint their own search engine to a humble third choice.

Yahoo suggests the user to use a broad method by offering the comparison search engine; by using Dogpile you are certain that what all three engines offer is probably the right thing.

From these three outcomes -- and again dedicated to this simple example -- MSN seems to apply the most transparent search rule. Google’s rule appears to be a commercial choice where Yahoo seems to offer the technical best option.

© 2006 Hans Bool

Hans Bool is the founder of Astor White a traditional management consulting company that offers online management advice. Astor Online solves issues in hours what normally would take days. You can apply for a free demo account