8/8/2005
Search Engine Overlap
NewsFactor Network reports in Search Engine Choice Affects Results that which search engine we choose effects the view we see of the web. I had always known that results can vary greatly from engine to engine. In tracking my own sites its easy to see the differences between first page, second page and latter rankings. The most interesting thing in the article though, is the number of unique links when comparing two or more engines on the same search terms.
When the results of two search engines were compared, 11 percent of the hits appeared in both results tables. That overlap dropped to 2.6 percent when three search engines were queried and to 1.1 percent among four search engines. On average, 74 percent of the first-page search results were unique to Ask Jeeves. Slightly less, or 71.2 percent, of Yahoo’s first-page results were unique.
MSN search results were close to Yahoo’s with 70.8 percent of the first-page results being listed only on that search engine. Nearly 67 percent of the first-page results for Google showed no overlap compared to the other search engines.
Popularity: 7%
