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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.
Within the next two years max. That spells trouble for Google and its shareholders, who still place a very high premium on what is quickly becoming a common service. Fortunately for Google insiders, they should be able to cash out long before the regular dopes in investorland figure this out.
Granted Teoma is operated by AskJeeves, but it's hardly the same engine, but it's too bad that they left it out. I think it's one of the better searches out there -- it tops MSN's new search, easily.
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.
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
I find it highly suspicious that Incredifind and Lycos Sidesearch were left out. I mean, c'mon, search "helpers" that install themselves automatically and lead me to fascinating products I never knew I needed deserve some mention, right???
It helped me track down a couple of old friends, even when all others had failed. To be fair, it was the last one that I had turned to - I'd even tried dogpile and lycos before that.
"How like you to drag your keyboard to a gun fight." - Aaron Bedard (BANE)
This is hardly fair as MSN search is in very early beta while Google and the rest have been around for several years
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!'".
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.
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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.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
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.)
I once had a signature.
Well, I started to find Google exteremely furstrating now. Whenever I try to serach for documents/specifications/data sheets of a certain protocol or an idea that has a large commercial use, google would send you pages, and pages, and pages of products that matched these keywords. It's very obvious that companies are buying these keywords. Thus, they have higher priorities on our first few pages in the search results.
"Evil thrives when good men do nothing"
I only visited Jeeves for the easter eggs. Sadly, it seems that most of them are now gone.
Cheers,
Adolfo
If somebody involved with this story can't count to five, how seriously should we consider it?
Sponsored by SILA -- Search for Intelligent Life in AmericaThe three most important words in a relationship are "I love you." The two most important are "Humor me."
The fact that Google has close to a monopoly on searching means there is too much of a chance that people will try to exploit its ranking system to push pages up the listings. Of course, I'm sure they are continually tweaking the ranking system to try to detect these pages, but if there were more search engines in popular use then it would be harder to find a way of exploiting them all at once.
It has nothing like one. Yahoo search, msn, altavista, dogpile, and many others exist and are used. Monopoly means something, and Google sure does not fit the definition of one.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
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.
I think Google is already in trouble.
I didn't need a team of British reporters and weeks of research, I just typed "Who has the fastest search engine" into the search engines. Duh! And the results are...
Google says "AlltheWeb"
Yahoo says "Ixquick"
MSN says "Ixquick"
Jeeves says "AlltheWeb"
To break the tie I asked the winners:
Ixquick said "AlltheWeb"
AlltheWeb said "Ixquick"
So there you have it: A tie.
What a stupid post.
Internet advertising was commodidized years ago, and that's where Google makes most of it's revenue, one way or another, according to the financial papers I read.
The fact that Google has profit now, even after 99% of businesses in the mythical "internet sector" have gone belly up, is a testament to the fact that they probably know more than you do about this whole business thing.
It's been a long time.
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.
How is that a problem? The problem is that the returned pages are pages i'm not looking for :-) If I'd go to yahoo and search for the same exact keywords, I'd get my documents from the first time! (I'm not suggesting the yahoo have better seraching algorithms)
"Evil thrives when good men do nothing"
This is the whole reason why Google has managed to survive.
(Assembled) computers, for example, are a commodity. Anyone can buy parts off Pricewatch, build them, and sell them. This doesn't stop companies from making money by doing it.
A better example would probably be Logitech. They make keyboards, mice, and speakers--certainly commodity items--and make money from selling them.
Same with Google. Anyone else can, and many other people do, provide relevance-engine searches, but Google does it better for cheaper than anyone else.
This is how capitalism is supposed to work. Google doesn't survive because they don't have relevant competition (like Microsoft), they survive because they can stand up to their competition (like Logitech).
And we all get better, cheaper stuff for it.
i always use http://www.jux2.com
it grabs results from google+yahoo+ask jeeves, and then ranks stuff according to how it appears in those. since there's only 35% overlap the results are usually better than using 1 engine alone.
Those snobby brits... Any tenuous connection to their fading culture and they're all over it!
On a completely relevant note, I have a whole playlist of P G Wodehouse audiobooks on my iPod.
Inspired, I'm going to start my own search engine called AskWooster. It will search for send its agents, called Gussie Finknottle, Tuppy Glossup and Bingo Little, out to seek for interesting stuff and return 3 cats, a fish and a size 14 top hat.
Whoosh...! The sound of all this going completely over the heads of the /. crowd.
If brands are irrelevant, howcome you are posting a link to wired on slashdot? Surely there are lots of other and even better web magazines and forums... just the names of sites escape my mind.
signatures pending - ansa@kos.to - (dont mail there)
I'd like to defend Microsoft this time... Their new search engine is barely through the "technical preview" (aka alpha in this case) stage and has been given limited resources as it's only available for beta testing purposes.
"The new competitor MSN has had teething problems and we should bear in mind this is a test mode."
Yeah, so why didn't you test the finished product? If they would've tested MSN Search, at least test search.msn.com and not beta.search.msn.com as they apparently have done. It's not interesting to me as a reader to see the performance of a search engine where very little fine tuning has been done. It's not like I'd use a search engine with little hardware resources causing more time-outs than succesful searches anyway, even if it would win in the test.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
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:
- No ads, no clutter, to the right search refinements and relevant links from catalogs.
- 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.
- 7 seconds
- No result on the first attempt. No results on the second attempt.
- Direct link to Timeanddate.com's page for Sydney is No 1.
Vivisimo:- Original interface with clustered results (frame-based), metasearch. 2 sponsored links.
- Top 249 results only. City No 1 (6), bikes No 2 (3), charity 11 (there are 20 results per page), explorer No 17.
- 10 seconds
- 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.
- Direct link to Timeanddate.com's page for Sydney is No 1.
AllTheWeb:- 3 sponsored results (marked as such) on top, no clutter, search refinements.
- 8,350,000 results. Bikes No 1 (and 2), city is No 3 (4,5...), charity No 9, explorer No 13.
- 5 seconds
- 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).
- 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.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
These are the searches I made in order and nothing cut out except for the cases where a question didn't give anything on page 1 for either of the engines.
:-)
:-)
Who created Slashdot?
Ask Jeeves: CmdrTaco as #1 (correct answer)
Google: CmdrTaco as #4
Who designed Ford?
Ask Jeeves: Henry Ford Academy as #1 (HF is correct)
Google: Nothing about Henry Ford on first page
What wavelength is red?
Ask Jeeves: 622-780 nm from search result description of #1
Google: "about 650 nm" if you follow link and read on in the page of #1
Sometimes we see negative side effects from this question system...
Where can I download Nero?
Ask Jeeves: First links to download service that did indeed have Nero as a download, but versions from 2000. Ahead.de as #3
Google: Ahead.de as #2 (a completely unrelated site as #1)
I tried to refine...
Where can I download the latest version of Nero?
Ask Jeeves: Got confused, but finally got the proper link (official download page) as #8
Google: Nero 6.6.0.1 (correct!) at unofficial site as #1, official site as #2.
Do SCO have a case?
Ask Jeeves: Groklaw.net as #1
Google: NewsForge analysing article as #1 and other SCO related news articles.
When do Revenge of the Sith have its premiere?
Ask Jeeves: "has its worldwide premiere on May 19, 2005" according to search result description for #2.
Google: Nothing in search result descriptions, and nothing I could find by following a few search result links on page 1.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Want to find an evil corporation?
How about a monopolist?
Or, for something a little different, the greatest threat to innovation in our world?
All straight from the horse's mouth. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
You're new around here, aren't you? Because, and I am saying this with a lot of love, Slashdot readers are not exactly the best example of the public's clothes buying habits.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
I would of liked to see a comparisation against the clusty search engine with those other search engines. I've found clusty to be very usefull with it's categorial search.
Although their "sponsored results" (taken from overture) tend to anoy me, as they look part of the search results.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.