Top search engines have little overlap in results
Dogpile.com is a metasearch tool that searches Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, and several other search engines all at once. Dogpile partnered with researchers at the U of Pittsburgh and Penn State to conduct a study and produce a report that shows that the first page of results returned by leading single (as opposed to meta) search engines differ quite a bit.
They tested Google, Yahoo, and Ask Jeeves independently. Only 3% of the results were shared by all three, 12% shared by two of the three, and 85% of the results were unique to only one search engine. And that’s just on the first page! I imagine that as you drill down farther and farther, it gets worse.
This is very important for library reference staff to be aware of as we rely on these tools for searching each and every day, but it is also important for us to educate our users about this. Teaching a web searching class sometime soon? Show them the pie chart from this article, or read them the statistics. The proof’s in the pudding. (Ah, a pie and a pudding reference in one paragraph…I must be hungry).
June 29th, 2005 at 11:14 am
Top search engines have little overlap in results
Link: LibrarianInBlack: Top search engines have little overlap in results.