How to find the best search engine

I am a big Google fan and hence whenever I think of doing any search on the net, Google is the only name that comes in my mind. I am sure there are many like me. But in-spite of me being a big fan, I thought one day, "Is it just because Google has become most popular search engine, it is best engine too? Or is it that others are crazy about Google and so I too am following Google?". Moreover I had to optimize my blog Natural Green Remedies. Hence I decided to put aside my emotional attachment to Google and find out which search engine is the best because if I can optimize my blog for the best search engine then it will get optimized for other search engines too (this is what I thought).

It was sometimes during the month of November in 2008 when I started to find the best search engine in the market. In my effort I came across a blog http://compsci.ca/blog/search-engine-traffic-comparison-google-yahoo-msn where an article was written about two years back that described a simple test to find the popularity and accuracy of any search engine and compare them.

This blog has old data but the procedures of the experiment looked convincing to me so I decided to the same test now (November 2008) and get the latest data. So here is the result of the test I performed (copied) from the above mentioned blog. We will consider only the major search engines for our experiment like Google search, Yahoo search and MSN search. I have kept the data for the search as same as those mentioned in the blog above so that I will be able to compare how different search engines have changed during these two years in their behavior.

First let us analyze a search result on the three engines.

Keyword is “compsci.ca” Result:-

Google - 8,940,000

Yahoo! - 80,200 (less than 1% that of Google)

MSN - 7,640 (less than 0.1% that of Google)

Do we really need to draw any inference here? Clearly Google has won by miles so far the number of indexed pages is concerned.

Now let’s go for more detailed test. We will do six searches on each search engine starting with general topic, moving on to niche and then very specific keyword. In each category we do first search in general and then second search is done specific to the site compsci.ca.

Let’s see what the result is.

Now here is the interesting comparison; if you take a look at the result of this same test two years back shown in the above mentioned blog, you will notice that Google was always high on the number of pages it used to index but its accuracy wasn’t so profound when compared with Yahoo or MSN particularly in case of niche topics where is was below its competitors. But this result shows a drastic change, number of pages indexed by Yahoo and MSN has increased in all cases but MSN has lost the accuracy dramatically while Yahoo is still holding its ground. But look at Google, it has reduced the number of indexed pages and has concentrated more on the accuracy of the results.

It seems both Google and its competitors took tips from one another; Google increased its accuracy that others (Yahoo and MSN) were doing while others concentrated more on increasing its indexed pages. But here is the difference, Google maintained the balance between the accuracy and the volume of results while MSN has lost its ground completely (it seems) and Yahoo looks like walking the middle path.

Yes I am fascinated by Google but this conclusion is based completely on the above results. Looking at the previous (two years back) result one could have had confusion about the search engine to choose (for broad topics go for Google and if you are looking for accuracy then go for Yahoo or MSN). But this result clearly gives Google the definite edge as it has improved itself in terms of accuracy and volume by maintaining the proper balance between the two.

I know it will definitely be said that this test do not fully cover all aspects of a search engine performance as the result depends on lot of factors like type of keywords, variety of keywords, location of the client from where the search is performed etc etc. But I think this test does give us some good idea about their behavior.

Hope you are not bored by all these data but as we have already started the discussion let me also mention about the popularity of these search engines. To analyze their popularity I went to http://www.compete.com. I just generated a simple report based on the number of unique visitors to these big shots, just to get an idea about their relative popularity.

So here is the result;

Past one year result shows that Google and Yahoo have been in some cut throat battle with each other while MSN seems to be a consistent under performer so far number of unique visitors to the site is concerned.

Maybe the above graph will give us an impression that we have an option between Google and Yahoo but if we take the above test result into consideration then Google take the lead. Not only this if we think like a webmaster then Google is the obvious choice as it offers a huge number of free services for webmasters that will help them optimize their site for search engine.

Now I hope I can safely say that if I go for SEO then I can take Google into consideration, no not because I am a Google fan but the data says so.

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