Lately, a lot of people say Google’s broken. Here I present another search engine comparison to see if Google’s still the best.
For my (non-scientific, non-representative) test, I will try to locate a target page with a set of keywords. If the page is in the first result list of the search engine, the search engine scores 1 point.
Description | URL | Keywords | Alta Vista | AllThe Web | Ask Jeeves | MSN | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
A recent CNN headline about Dell canceling Indian support. | edition.cnn.com/ 2003/TECH/biztech/11/24/ dell.call.centers.ap/index.html | Dell cancels Indian Support CNN | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
The Davezilla-Blog homepage. | www.davezilla.com | davezilla | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
The weblog by Jerz. | jerz.setonhill.edu/ weblog/index.jsp | Jerz weblog | 1 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
A German TV station. I enter the name of the channel and “TV” | www.ard.de | ARD fernsehen | 1 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
One of my own sites, the “Kuching Quick Guide”. | kuching.outer-court.com | kuching quick guide | 1 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 1 |
A German tech news site; the Heise news. | www.heise.de | Heise Nachrichten | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
A well-organized browser download page. | browsers.evolt.org | Evolt Browsers Download | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
An SVG drawing tool by JASC Software. | www.jasc.com/ products/webdraw/ or www.jasc.com/ webdraw.asp | Jasc WebDraw | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
Another software package, this time an FTP-client. | www.vandyke.com/ download/absoluteftp or www.vandyke.com/ download/absoluteftp/ 1.9.6/index.html | AbsoluteFTP download | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
Result: | 8 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 9 |
As you can see from this very brief test, MSN scores the best result, Google comes in second, and Altavista last.
Also see Search Engines Put to the Test.
“Starting on the 16th of November, a major shift in results was seen on Google. (...)
Google appeared to be doing a major update, not
seen for many months, as reported first on WebMasterWorld who named it “Florida”,
continuing the tradition of naming updates rather like hurricanes. In this
case it was a hurricane! (...)
It appeared (...) that some sort of over-SEOd filter had been applied to check
if overt SEO had been done for that particular phrase. It was as if Google
were checking to see if external links to the site included the phrase,
on-page optimisation was being done for the phrase and even if the domain
included the phrase. If the density of the optimisation, both on and off
the page, appeared too artificial, then a filter was tripped and down went
the page – solely for that phrase. (...)
Google are trying to redress the balance by trying to eradicate obvious search engine manipulation from their most competitive results. (...)
[The] days of easy rankings through simple SEO are over.”
– Barry Lloyd, Been
Gazumped by Google? Trying to make Sense of the “Florida” Update!, 2003-11-25
>> More posts
Advertisement
This site unofficially covers Google™ and more with some rights reserved. Join our forum!