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Thanks, Gary! This is a good example. I've been curious about trying this type of comparison for a while now.
I have looked at Gary's searches closer and have collected some statistics that should be interesting for many. That said, I was surprised that yahoo collected few results and I suspect it's "misbehaving" today; so I will try yahoo again at another time.
Here's statistics on unique people names in all three engines:
Google: 618 names; a clear winner
Live: 499 names;
Yahoo: 203 names (but maybe it's having a bad day)
Overlap:
Live and Google overlap: 223 people
Yahoo and Google overlap: 107 people.
By the way Google has the most number of results but fewer than 1,000; it corrected its guess after I went though all of the results.
Here are the tools I used for this analysis:
Broadlook Diver
MS Excel.
Other thoughts and experiments on search engine comparison are welcome!
A few questions about this comparison - first, the search strings are different... (apples to apples?)... Also, does Live once again take the inurl:command?
With something much more simple, and therefore eliminating Google's automatic stemming, typo recovery and synonym searching,etc., I nearly ALWAYS get the most results with Yahoo. Since Google looks for so much more than what you ask for, it would make sense the quantity is greater in Google, but when that is controllled for, Google routinely is last on my list.
For example, a search of my name, (in quotes), yields 5,400 in Google, 16,000 in Yahoo and 922,000 in Live (this is suspected in Live).
A search for the word "the" yeilds 17 billion in google, but 28 billion in Yahoo...
A great tool to compare the three right next to each other (number of results and all) is Jux2. For testing results QUANTITY it's a great site. As you know, keep the search simple,and use Boolean that all three sites understand in order to compare aples to apples. A search if the word "resume" for example shows 155mil in google vs. 678mil in Yahoo.
Either way, Google, Yahoo and Live only allow you to see the first 1000 results (so who cares if there are 4.9ba-gillion?), and since the ranking of those results will be different, I highly recommend using more than one search engine. User research shows that most people only look at the first few pages anyway, if they ever get off of the first page of results to begin with.
Don't let Google's quantity of results lead you to believe that they are the "biggest" - Google usually looks for what you aksed plus lots of other things it "thinks" you want as well. Elimiate that, and Google's quantity suddently doesn't look so "big".
Put me in the "use more than one" camp.
These is a great discussion for Quantity as Kelly mentions but I think this needs to be looked at as Quality as well. A LinkedIn is only going to give me a specific person once where Google could give me that same person 1000 different linked ways but it's still just once specific person.
Kelly,
You are bringing up some good points and hopefully others will respond. It's good to compare apples to apples. Let's try to come up with more examples and statistics that will educate us.
As you are correctly pointing out search engines will not find more than 1,000 results. Any number that is higher (especially if it is much higher) is just a guess and cannot be used for comparison . Therefore, if one wants to compare numbers of results one needs to create an example where the number of results is less than 1,000. Searches on "the" and your name have more results than 1,000 so the numbers of results do not tell us any reliable info.
Since you say that Yahoo brings the most results in your sourcing practice, perhaps you could prove that by giving us an example of a search? The numbers of results must be below 1,000; also "repeat search with the omitted results included" will need to be used for proper testing.
This comparison is also a good way for all of us to learn the syntax and operators of search engines. The Live search help is located here.
Kelly said:A few questions about this comparison - first, the search strings are different... (apples to apples?)... Also, does Live once again take the inurl:command?
With something much more simple, and therefore eliminating Google's automatic stemming, typo recovery and synonym searching,etc., I nearly ALWAYS get the most results with Yahoo. Since Google looks for so much more than what you ask for, it would make sense the quantity is greater in Google, but when that is controllled for, Google routinely is last on my list.
For example, a search of my name, (in quotes), yields 5,400 in Google, 16,000 in Yahoo and 922,000 in Live (this is suspected in Live).
A search for the word "the" yeilds 17 billion in google, but 28 billion in Yahoo...
A great tool to compare the three right next to each other (number of results and all) is Jux2. For testing results QUANTITY it's a great site. As you know, keep the search simple,and use Boolean that all three sites understand in order to compare aples to apples. A search if the word "resume" for example shows 155mil in google vs. 678mil in Yahoo.
Either way, Google, Yahoo and Live only allow you to see the first 1000 results (so who cares if there are 4.9ba-gillion?), and since the ranking of those results will be different, I highly recommend using more than one search engine. User research shows that most people only look at the first few pages anyway, if they ever get off of the first page of results to begin with.
Don't let Google's quantity of results lead you to believe that they are the "biggest" - Google usually looks for what you aksed plus lots of other things it "thinks" you want as well. Elimiate that, and Google's quantity suddently doesn't look so "big".
Put me in the "use more than one" camp.
Here's a few more search examples to prove the point that Yahoo returns more results than Google. ...
Hi Kelly,
I tried one of your examples just now,
intitle:speakers OR inurl:speakers OR intitle:keynotes OR inurl:keynotes) "director of human resources"
and in fact Google finds 343 results, Yahoo finds 306 results. To make a true comparison, you need to "repeat the searches with the omitted results included" which also gives the engines a chance to review and finalize the list of results.
I agree that these discussions are fun!
Kelly said:Here's a few more search examples to prove the point that Yahoo returns more results than Google. ...
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