Saturday, January 21, 2006

How Quickly Do Different Search Engines Mirror the Web?

Since the end of last year, I’ve pitched 5 search engines against each other in a phrase search for “Copyright 2006” (which appears in the footer of many pages after new year). For example, Google had slightly over 2 million results for this phrase before new year; roughly a week later, it showed 28 million pages.

Gigablast was the only search engine which didn’t pick up any new pages at all. Ask Jeeves was in another league as well, but indexed some results (around 3 million). Yahoo picked up by far the most fresh pages, and was doing so quicker than others. MSN had a good start but then slowed down, and was overtaken by Google who now comes in second.

Note the results shown here are not necessarily connected to search results quality; e.g. a search engine may decide that certain content (like a spam farm copying other sites) is not interesting enough to searchers to be picked up often.

How Quickly Do Different ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (4)

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