Search Engines Give Vastly Different Results

Posted on August 5, 2005

InternetNews.com reports that a new study by the multi-search tool Dogpile has found that each of the major search engines provides vastly different results. After running 12,570 queries through Yahoo, Google, MSN and Ask Jeeves and comparing the top results (page one results) Dogpile found that a mere 1.1% of the results could be found on all four search engines. 2.6% percent of the results were found on three different search engines and 11.4% were shared by two of the search engines. Yahoo had the most unique results of any of the four search engines.

"The top four search engines are very viable sources of information," said Brian Bowman, Infospace vice president of marketing and product management. "But they're vastly different on page one. And most people never go beyond page one."

Breaking those stats down by search engine, Google had the lowest percentage of unique results, at 66.4 percent. Yahoo, MSN and AskJeeves all were within 3.1 percent of each other, with Yahoo having the highest percentage of unique results at 71.2 percent.

The theory suggest that using only one search engine for in-depth research may be a very bad idea since each of the search engines provides greatly different results.



More from HowToWeb