Them Search Engines – they’re all the blinkin’ same guvnor!

Date Published 07/10/2006 - Click here for more recent news

How many times have you heard someone say that this or that Search Engine (SE) “is a complete waste of time” - or that you ought not to bother chasing search engine popularity at all because “they all return the same results anyway!”

Here at EASIserv.com we hear that, or similar, often and then that other old favourite – OK, so what is the difference between the results you get from the main search engines?  Well that came up with us, yet again, at a client meeting the other day, so we thought it maybe about time that we did a bit of data-mining to finally allow us to be able to respond with some facts – that’s always a novel position to take in our experience.

The methodology we used was to capture the Top 100 results returned for our favourite keyword / phrase northampton web design from Google, Yahoo!, MSN / Live.com and Ask (in the same time-frame) and analyse those results looking for any similarities and / or patterns of results?  We’re pleased to be able share with you some highlights of what we identified - as shown below:

1. Results by Volume

As we’ve reflected on numerous other occasions - there’s a significant difference in the sheer volume of results returned by each of the 4 x SEs with Google and Yahoo! returning roughly 10 times more results than the other 2 x SEs at about 2m+ and MSN/ Live.com and Ask returning 200k and 300k results respectively.

NB: as further evidence of how search engine indices change over time - here's the same keyword / phrase search with results taken 6 months later on 12/04/07; Google showing approx 50% less results being the most striking feature!

2. Comparing the Top 10 results returned by all 4 x SEs

A direct comparison of ALL 4 x SE’s Top 10 results showed there to be only 1 x result in this sample that appeared in ALL 4 x SEs.  The good news for EASIserv.com is that it was our own result and the even better news for EASIserv.com is that our result for northampton web design was No. 1 in ALL 4 x SEs.  This was quite a striking finding for us - because it is real validation of the time and effort we put into making sure that the EASIserv.com website’s search-engine-friendliness encompasses ALL SEs.  Seems we’re doing something right!

The table below shows the respective 4 x SE Top 10s where there are indeed incidences of similar listings.  However, apart from the EASIserv.com result, only 1 x other result appears in 3 x SEs and 5 x other results appear in at least 2 x SEs.

3. Comparing the Top 100 results returned by all 4 x SEs

A direct comparison of ALL 4 x SE’s Top 100 results might have taxed the somewhat limited resources of the EASIserv.com statisticians – so we limited ourselves to a review of the other 3 x SE Top 100 results as compared to Google.  This is probably not a statistically valid comparison and is really more a case of “how much like Google SE results are the other 3 x SE results”.  The table below shows MSN / Live.com results to be most like Google results and Ask results to be least like Google results.

4. Summary

Of course none of this review addresses the fundamental ‘quality’ and ‘relevance’ issues of SE results and as that latter-day search guru Mark Twain once said - “there’s lies, damned lies and statistics”.  But so far as the Top 10 results and Top 100 results comparisons go, hopefully this limited set of statistics we've provided, does at least tend to give the lie to the view that - “they’re all the same”.  Vive la différences!

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