BBC Magazine's Search-Engine Shootout

An anonymous reader writes "On BBC Online's excellent Magazine, there is a shootout between Google, MSN, Yahoo! and Ask Jeeves. Search tests were conducted on five criteria: an obscure fact; multiple meanings of "raleigh"; speed; and current time in Sydney. Yahoo! is the fastest of the lot. Google has the cleanest interface. MSN Search fared worst of all. Jeeves is the apparent winner for features like related search. (Author claims to be a Google nut.)" This may be the nicest thing anyone's ever said about Jeeves.

Comments

If you can't think of anything interesting to say

[Noksagt]

and want karma, just steal it from the previous thread which discusses this article.

oops--cynical mode off. If you are interested in the article, please seach through the above thread for other interesting comments & so that your own comments can be even more interesting or insightful

Interface

[Poromenos1]

The most important thing for me is a clean interface, and thus I don't care much if Yahoo is faster. Just compare hotmail with gmail, hotmail is like a newspaper. I just want to read my email! I hope MSN search doesn't load thousands of images to display your query.

Re:Interface

[Chess_the_cat]

I think you may be confusing Yahoo! the web portal with Yahoo! the search engine.. As you can see, Yahoo!'s search page is as clean if not cleaner than Google's.

Re:How long until relevance engines are commoditie

[spoonist]

Wired recently had an article recently about how brand names along just aren't cutting it any more.

Consumers are wising up the quality is more important than name.

Since when..

[omghi2u]

Since when have people actually *used* Ask Jeeves? I've driven by their office (in LG) before, and it looks pretty sad. I can understand a shootout between MSN, Google, and Yahoo, but to incorporate Ask Jeeves is like inviting a Christmas Island to nuclear talks with North Korea.

Teoma, Vivisimo and AllTheWeb

[danila]

I know that I use non-google search engines quite a lot, so I decided to contribute with my results. I repeated the test for Teoma, Vivisimo and AllTheWeb. The results are presented below in the format generally similar to that in the BBC article.

These sites don't give the time it took them, so I could only measure how fast the page loaded. My connection is relatively slow (google loads in 2-3 seconds, Yahoo in 7 seconds), so speed measurements are not very reliable or useful, but I gave them anyway.

It's not clear from the BBC article what was the exact query for the second test. I used "What's the reported IQ of an Alsatian" (without quotes) for the first attempt (later I tried this at Google and it didn't work, so consider this attempt invalid). After none of the search engines gave anything, I tried "Alsatian dog IQ" (without quotes).

Teoma:

1. No ads, no clutter, to the right search refinements and relevant links from catalogs.
   
2. 3,272,000 results. City is No 1 (as well as 2,4...), bikes are No 3 (and 6), explorer is No 5, charity is not on the first 6 pages.
   
3. 7 seconds
   
4. No result on the first attempt. No results on the second attempt.
   
5. Direct link to Timeanddate.com's page for Sydney is No 1.

Vivisimo:

1. Original interface with clustered results (frame-based), metasearch. 2 sponsored links.
   
2. Top 249 results only. City No 1 (6), bikes No 2 (3), charity 11 (there are 20 results per page), explorer No 17.
   
3. 10 seconds
   
4. No result on the first attempt. During second attempt using the "Shepherd" cluster and the 6th result I found out that Alsatians are the 3rd smartest breed (after border collies and poodles), but no exact IQ estimate.
   
5. Direct link to Timeanddate.com's page for Sydney is No 1.

AllTheWeb:

1. 3 sponsored results (marked as such) on top, no clutter, search refinements.
   
2. 8,350,000 results. Bikes No 1 (and 2), city is No 3 (4,5...), charity No 9, explorer No 13.
   
3. 5 seconds
   
4. No result on the first attempt. On the second attempt it listed the relevant page at No 11 (although unlike at Google, the answer itself wasn't in the site summary).
   
5. Direct link to Timeanddate.com's page for Sydney is No 3.

Conclusions: AllTheWeb is excellent for searching, basically as good as Google (from this very limited test). Vivisimo is good for searching, clustering is very good. Teoma no as good - didn't find the charity.

Refinements at Teoma are almost as good as Jeeves. Refinements at Vivisimo the clustering is not as effective as at Jeeves (because the number of search results is smaller), but still good. Refinements at AllTheWeb, though there wasn't any for explorer or charity.

Interface is great everywhere, no gimmicks, like at A9 (which has a monstrously huge 200Kbyte page), everything is slick. Frame interface at Vivisimo is good. Not too much ads, at Vivisimo they are marked, at AllTheWeb they are marked too, but not as well, and Teoma doesn't have ads.

Next I will try some visual search tools (Grokker, Kartoo, etc.) and will post the results in the reply to this post.

Re:Easter eggs

[Anonymous Coward]

Clicky and learn, friend.

Random text to avoid lameness filter. Rob Malda is a sexy man. I wish he didn't marry Kathleen Fent so I could offer my manslot to him upon every waking moment.