Search Engine Comparison (Long Post)

01/27/2012

Introduction

I started this project out of my own curiosity, then I decided to make it into a blog post. Since I didn't begin with the idea of organizing the results, I didn't start with controlled vocabulary and a list of points to look for and all those other things that make good statistics.

Then when I realized I could turn this into a blog post, I became overwhelmed with the thought of having to start over (boring) or create perfect charts. Then I reminded myself that this is a blog post, not an academic articles, so naturally formed information is acceptable as long as people know what they are getting.

So here you are, obvious holes and all.

Background

What prompted this project is that I occasionally like to check and see if what I think is true, actually is true. It had been a while since I compared search engines and I wanted to see if anything had changed. I also wanted to see what the best search methods are (keywords, short phrases, full sentences).

Notes and Methods

All search engines gave 10 results per page.

I only looked at the first page.

All search engines contained duplicate results, meaning same or different pages from the same URL.

Suggested Searches in Dropdown = Suggested searches that show while typing in search box

I did not count carefully which results were the same across search engines. I looked at URLs and decided if all, some, or no results were similar to Dogpile's results.

Compared all search engines results to Dopgile because it searches the other three.

I ran an organic search. That is, I started with the vague idea "I want to know something about painting my own car," and then refined the search based on what I wanted to know as I read the first set of results.