Top 3 Internet Search Engines - A Comparison
Over the years search engines have grown to be one of the most crucial aspects of the World Wide Web. Read out on this article to judge out on yourself and who are the ones who truly deliver what we expect out of them.
I have been searching the Internet since morning and feel pretty much tired now. I have these three best search engines open in my firefox browser – Google (the 'good' monster), Yahoo (the 'never say die' monster) and MSN Live (the ‘still trying to convince’ monster). All throughout the day, I had several experiences on these search engines out of which I found one as very peculiar. Read through the article to know about that experience and about these three top search engines.
Google.com is regarded as the best search engine to date because of its "Don't Be Evil" mantra, its dominance over the Internet in search engine technology and its ever changing smart, patented or not, algorithms. Larry Page and Sergey Brin are not only the inventors of Google but this duo is the real driving force of the Google engine. They envisioned giving people what they really want and they truly achieved their mission, or dream, as some say. They are the people who changed how people search and get information on the Internet. Google literally took the internet to the drycleaners by eliminating unrelated search results and duplicates. Prior to Google, if a person wanted to get some information, the results that one mostly got was illegal stuff and adult media. Google.com had such an impact on the Internet community that it has become a verb in English language. Google is one such company that still has long way to go and with its current form and approach, it seems like it.
Yahoo has been one of the Internet’s oldest power houses known on the web. David Filo and Jerry Yang found Yahoo to keep track of their personal interests on the Internet. Slowly, Yahoo began to grow in terms of information as well as visitors. Yahoo categories became full and a need for sub categorization emerged. Very soon, Yahoo became a rich web directory with ample source of content as well as returning visitors. Yahoo became popular with its wide array of services including the popular ones like free email and chat. Gradually, Yahoo had to provide a search to its users. Initially Yahoo used Google’s search technology for providing search to its visitors. Over the years, Yahoo wanted to be known as a search engine in itself and it dumped Google technology and worked on its own. Yahoo acquired a number of technologies from majors like Inktomi, Altavista, Overture, etc. Yahoo gradually developed a good search engine.
MSN’s Live Search by Microsoft formerly just called ' MSN Search' was a search engine no one seemed to know much about. Its own community particularly used it. MSN search engine was based on Inktomi technology for a long time until Yahoo acquired the latter. Microsoft has always ruled out Google Search, saying Google is specifically just a search engine. Microsoft never seemed to care about Google search engine gaining its dominance. Microsoft has always been itching to beat down Google’s search. MSN’s Live search engine came into being with the same purpose.
Head 2 Head Comparison
I would like to provide you with some analysis so you can see for yourself how these search engines fare against each other in various aspects of Web searching.
Results Fetching Speed
[These tests are done on 512 Kbps shared (56.6 Kbps Core)]
Keyword used: Silicon Valley
Speed along with search result count was used to ascertain the result.
Daily Searches Done
(Source: Nielsen Net Ratings for July 2006)
U.S Reach
(Source: quantcast)
Search Features
Index Size
On August 8th, 2005 Yahoo announced they have 20 billion-page index, which was higher than Google at that time. Google never agreed to these claims and many people suggested that Yahoo search results had more duplicates than Google. Index size of all these 3 search engines is so huge and there are so many anomalies that there is no point considering index size as a parameter whilst comparing them.
Algorithm, Technology and Quality Coding
As these 3 companies will never give away their source codes for people to study, we will never know who has better search technology than their counterpart. The only thing we can do is see what they provide to their end users and imagine what might be behind these results. I was going through SERPs of these engines and I found a very funny thing today. What I did was I visited Google.com and searched for the words search engines, then clicked on the result that showed Dogpile’s cached version. Here's a screenshot:
Google.com is regarded as the best search engine to date because of its "Don't Be Evil" mantra, its dominance over the Internet in search engine technology and its ever changing smart, patented or not, algorithms. Larry Page and Sergey Brin are not only the inventors of Google but this duo is the real driving force of the Google engine. They envisioned giving people what they really want and they truly achieved their mission, or dream, as some say. They are the people who changed how people search and get information on the Internet. Google literally took the internet to the drycleaners by eliminating unrelated search results and duplicates. Prior to Google, if a person wanted to get some information, the results that one mostly got was illegal stuff and adult media. Google.com had such an impact on the Internet community that it has become a verb in English language. Google is one such company that still has long way to go and with its current form and approach, it seems like it.
Yahoo has been one of the Internet’s oldest power houses known on the web. David Filo and Jerry Yang found Yahoo to keep track of their personal interests on the Internet. Slowly, Yahoo began to grow in terms of information as well as visitors. Yahoo categories became full and a need for sub categorization emerged. Very soon, Yahoo became a rich web directory with ample source of content as well as returning visitors. Yahoo became popular with its wide array of services including the popular ones like free email and chat. Gradually, Yahoo had to provide a search to its users. Initially Yahoo used Google’s search technology for providing search to its visitors. Over the years, Yahoo wanted to be known as a search engine in itself and it dumped Google technology and worked on its own. Yahoo acquired a number of technologies from majors like Inktomi, Altavista, Overture, etc. Yahoo gradually developed a good search engine.
MSN’s Live Search by Microsoft formerly just called ' MSN Search' was a search engine no one seemed to know much about. Its own community particularly used it. MSN search engine was based on Inktomi technology for a long time until Yahoo acquired the latter. Microsoft has always ruled out Google Search, saying Google is specifically just a search engine. Microsoft never seemed to care about Google search engine gaining its dominance. Microsoft has always been itching to beat down Google’s search. MSN’s Live search engine came into being with the same purpose.
Head 2 Head Comparison
I would like to provide you with some analysis so you can see for yourself how these search engines fare against each other in various aspects of Web searching.
Results Fetching Speed
[These tests are done on 512 Kbps shared (56.6 Kbps Core)]
Keyword used: Silicon Valley
- Google - 0.13 seconds to fetch 53,200,000 pages
- Yahoo - 0.17 sec seconds to fetch 35,300,000 pages
- MSN Live - 0.13 seconds to fetch 6,061,755 pages
- Google - 0.22 seconds to fetch 1,180,000,000 pages
- Yahoo - 0.26 seconds to fetch 3,540,000,000 pages
- MSN Live - 0.35 seconds to fetch 487,988,046 pages
Speed along with search result count was used to ascertain the result.
Daily Searches Done
(Source: Nielsen Net Ratings for July 2006)
- Google - 49.2%
- Yahoo - 23.8% (exclude searches done at AltaVista, AllTheWeb and Overture)
- MSN Live - 9.6%
- Rest of the Engines – 17.4%
U.S Reach
(Source: quantcast)
- Google - U.S. Reach: 118,682,840 | Rank: 2
- Yahoo Search - U.S. Reach: 52,514,136 | Rank: 6
- MSN Live - U.S. Reach: 46,213,680 | Rank: 7
Search Features
- Google
- Limited Boolean searching
- Field keys: intitle:, inurl:, allintitle:, link:, allinurl:, site:, allinanchor:, related:, numrange:, pricerange, flink:
- Has a built in powerful calculator which is useful to calculate numbers, measurements, currencies, etc
- Yahoo Search
- Better Boolean Searching than Google: AND, OR, NOT,( ), -
- Field keys: intitle:, site: or domain:, hostname:, link:, linkdomain:, url:, inurl:, originurlextension:, feature:acrobat, feature:applet, feature:activex, feature:audio, feature:flash, feature:form, feature:frame, feature:homepage, feature:image, feature:index, feature:javascript, feature:meta, feature:script, feature:shockwave, feature:table, feature:video, feature:vrml
- Yahoo has a good built in calculator as well
- MSN Live Search
- Offers full Boolean searching
- Field keys: site:,filetype:,intitle:,inbody:,inanchor:,inurl:,language:,loc:,link:,linkdomain:,linkfromdomain:,contains:,ip:,prefer:,feed:,hasfeed:,url:
- MSN Live has a built in calculator though it is very meager and proves to be insufficient most of the time
Index Size
On August 8th, 2005 Yahoo announced they have 20 billion-page index, which was higher than Google at that time. Google never agreed to these claims and many people suggested that Yahoo search results had more duplicates than Google. Index size of all these 3 search engines is so huge and there are so many anomalies that there is no point considering index size as a parameter whilst comparing them.
Algorithm, Technology and Quality Coding
As these 3 companies will never give away their source codes for people to study, we will never know who has better search technology than their counterpart. The only thing we can do is see what they provide to their end users and imagine what might be behind these results. I was going through SERPs of these engines and I found a very funny thing today. What I did was I visited Google.com and searched for the words search engines, then clicked on the result that showed Dogpile’s cached version. Here's a screenshot:
- Cached version of dogpile on Google.com
- Searched wiki on Google.com and clicked the cached version of wikipedia
- Searched google on Google.com and clicked on cached version of Google
- Searched yahoo search on Yahoo.com and clicked the cached version of Yahoo Search
- Searched live search on Live.com and clicked the cached version of Live.com
Google shows the message that "Google is neither affiliated with the authors of this page nor responsible for this content". Well we know they are right.
Google again shows that it isn't affiliated with this page. Seems to be the case to me, what do you think?
But does Google show same message for it's own pages? See next screenshot:
This time Google did NOT show the message, quite understandably as it was the cached version of its own page.
But how does Yahoo and MSN Live handle page caching? See the screenshots below to know.
Oh well, Yahoo shows the message "Yahoo is not affiliated with the authors of this page or responsible for its content" for cached version of it's own pages!
Do you think the same happens on MSN's Live.com?
Even Microsoft, the masters of programming, have goofed up caching of pages!
So even idols have clay feet, which is evident in the interesting screenshots above. These simple things give hints that Google has more control over their search technology and their programmers/QA seem to be working more seriously than Yahoo and MSN.
Oh! its late, got to get back to work. Coffee anyone?
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