Ever since “google for it” became a phrase in day to day net lingo, the business of searching has taken on a different tone. Besides Google, which for obvious reasons comes to mind first, Yahoo seems to have worked on its searching act and Microsoft, the latest kid on the “search the web” block offers us search at MSN.

So which of these is the best search engine? Lets ask the the engines themselves. I ran two queries: “best search engine” and a more question-like, “which is the best search engine”.

For your information and amusement, my observations follow:

Query 1: best search engine

Google
Results 1 - 10 of about 18,500,000 for best search engine. (0.34 seconds)

The regular clean look, that we’ve all come to know and love. Two sponsored links on the right hand side.

The first six links were to sites which seemingly help choose a relevant search engine - I didn’t click through any - and the last four pointed to other search engines or search engine aggregation services.

Nowhere on the result page did Google, Yahoo or MSN figure.

Yahoo
Results 1 - 10 of about 19,000,000 for best search engine - 0.17 sec.

The page looks even more minimalistic than Google, if thats possible. No sponsored links.

Ten links, each to a search engine, with (hold your breath) Yahoo topping the list, followed by Google in second place. MSN was not amongst these and I didn’t look further.

MSN
1-8 of 10,922,549 containing best search engine (0.16 seconds)

Compared to Google and Yahoo, the result page looks a little heavy.

Eight results, surrounded by sponsored links (three on the top, three at the bottom and five along the right side).

The results were like Google’s, mostly to sites which purportedly help one with a search engine selection. There were two links to actual search engines, one of which was Google.

What I found amusing was that the first sponsored link on the top (which incidentally happens to be the first link on the page under the Web Results heading) was a link to MSN itself. And… the first of the three sponsored links at the bottom was once again, MSN Search itself.

Query 2: which is the best search engine

Google: Practically the same result set as the first one. No sponsored links this time.

Yahoo: Similar to previous result set, with the difference that Google is now the first link, with another at sixth position (to Google UK) and the last link on the page is Yahoo.

MSN Search: Similar results to it’s first run. Sponsored sites dropped to two, neither being MSN. Google still figures about half way down.

Note:
Don’t take these tests too seriously. I did them on impulse, more for fun and out of curiosity. I haven’t analyzed size, validity & accuracy; or checked for similarity of result links across the engines; and have treated a reference to yahoo.com the same as search.yahoo.com and so on.

The question remains. Which is the best search engine? What do you use for your web searching? And why? :)

This entry was posted on Friday, February 11th, 2005 at 1:33 pm and is filed under Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.