Are you frustrated at not getting the results you want from your favorite search engine? Or maybe you think that because you use a popular search engine you are getting the top hits out there. Well consider this—if you are only using one search engine you are almost certainly not picking up the best available results for any given query.



How do I know this?

A recent study has shown a startling lack of overlap between first page results across four major search engines. The study, by Dogpile.com, tested Google, MSN Search, Yahoo Search and Ask Jeeves and found that the first page results from thousands of random queries only overlapped across the four engines 1.1 per cent of the time. This means that a massive 84.9 per cent of first page results were unique to one search engine.

To make this point hit home even further, the study found that if you are only searching Google you could miss 70.8 per cent of best first page results; if you are only searching Yahoo! you could miss 69.4 per cent of best first page search results. With MSN Search, it is 72.0 per cent and with Ask Jeeves it is 67.9 per cent.

So simply stated, if you need great search results and you are only using one or even two search engines, you could be missing out big time.

What can you do about it?

The obvious answer is to broaden your search horizons. Use more than one search engine and take the time to learn how to search each engine effectively. In other words, read the Search Tips and Help information and experiment with the advanced search options.

You should also consider running your search through a couple of metasearchers such as Vivisimo.com, Dogpile.com or Ixquick.com. Metasearchers search across a range of single search engines and are a good way of deciding what search engine might be best for a particular query.

One tip though - don’t only search metasearchers. While they are good for an overview of what is available from different single search engines, you will still get the best results by querying single search engines individually. Metasearchers do not offer the full range of search options that are available on each individual search engine.

Another point to consider is that some search engines limit the amount of content they index on a particular site. For example, according to Greg Notess of Search Engine Showdown, Google only indexes the first 101 KB of a Web page while Yahoo! indexes the first 500 KB of a page. You might think that this isn’t a problem because the most relevant keywords will appear in the meta tags or first few paragraphs. In most cases, this is true, but when you are searching for something obscure such as a name, word or phrase buried deep within a site, you may not pull it up if you are only using Google.

You’ve heard the expression knowledge is power. Well you can only carry around so much knowledge so knowing how to find the information you need has to be almost as good as having it in your head.

See the Different Engines, Different Results study at http://CompareSearchEngines.dogpile.com/OverlapAnalysis