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

Google - category sorting could help.

[Japong]

If I recall correctly, Google does a lot of its indexing and listings by how many web pages link to the page in question, the more popular the page, the closer it is to being first in relevance of a search.

I've found this to be quite troublesome when it comes to searches for information that instead give me commercial sites trying to sell things - "samsung 753df monitor review" gives me one actual review and then a couple of pages worth of links to sites that simply include user reviews.

Google really needs a better way to filter out these pages than having users type in "-consumer, -resale -'buy now!'".

Re:How long until relevance engines are commoditie

[FiReaNGeL]

Jeans are common things, and yet, people still buy Levis.

Brand recognition is key in any market. And dont think that when search engines become "common", they'll be better than Google. Running www.Google.com isnt in the reach of most... hardware costs, knowledge, etc.

Even Microsoft can't seem to catch up with them, and it's been many years Google is #1 in my book.

Speed

[Concerned Onlooker]

Perhaps someone can enlighten me as to why speed really matters in these cases. Can you really tell the difference between a .18 second return and a .97 second return once you account for varying connection speeds, internet traffic, etc? Is speed really a relevant criterion? Obviously I'm missing something.

measured time for speed is flawed

[pikine]

From TFA: Yahoo: 0.18 seconds. Google: 0.97 seconds. MSN: 0.92 seconds. Others not available.

I think the author got these numbers from the search page, where the time is shown along the number of search results. However, the meaning of this number is not well-defined. I don't think it's even guaranteed to be accurate.

(btw, I tried on Google for "raleigh" and I got 0.30 seconds. Yahoo gives me 0.12 seconds. Trying jumping around the search results page, Yahoo gives me about 0.25 seconds, and Google sometimes goes as high as 0.70 seconds. However, I must note that Yahoo doesn't let me jump over as many as +/- 5 pages, but Google lets me jump over +/- 10 pages.)