« How to get free e-Learning | Main | Laptops get all skinny »

June 26, 2007

Search more than one search engine or you're missing a lot

A recent report from Dogpile (a great metasearch engine) found that the overlap in search engine results is decreasing...and it wasn't that high to begin with.  Search Engine Land has a great write-up of the report.  Here are some highlights:

  • In 2007, "only 0.6 percent first page search results were the same" across the four top search engines. 
  • Maybe you're thinking--that's not fair!  you can't expect a lot of overlap between four different engines!  How about two?  Well, it's better, but still only 8.9% overlap in the first page's results between two engines. 
  • Overall, this works out to 88.3% of total results being unique to one engine.

The average searcher is not going to have any idea about this--and probably doesn't care.  But we, as library folk, should care.  It means we should be using metasearch engines.  Or we should be using more than one engine at a time.  We should try to educate our users about this.  We should try to make it clear that if you're looking for research, for comprehensive answers, one engine ain't gonna do it for ya.

June 26, 2007 | Permalink

TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d8341c511253ef00e5505216578833

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Search more than one search engine or you're missing a lot:

Comments

That's a good point MJ. Dogpile has been putting out similar studies for a while now, and they've become quite trusted. As I understand it, they fund the study but someone else runs it. I've run my own informal tests between search engines, and my anecdotal evidence of the lack of cross-over in results does bear out their results. So, I trust them. Everyone else can decide for themselves :)

Posted by: Sarah Houghton-Jan (LiB) | June28, 2007

Don't you think a report from a metasearch engine company, that says how valuable metasearch is, is kind of suspect? I remember I stopped using Dogpile (years ago, when Google came on the scene) because the results were essentially the same in all of the engines it checked.

Posted by: MJ | June28, 2007

Post a comment

*Please only submit your comment once. Comments are moderated due to spam problems. I have to approve the comment before it will show up. I will try to do it quickly.*
LiB's simple ground rules for comments:
1. No personal attacks, rude, or intolerant comments.
2. Comments need to actually relate to the blog post topic.