Is One Search Engine Enough?
Since I have been looking at my use of search engines with a little more determination recently I am slowly starting to realize that limiting myself to one search engine may not be a wise idea. While reading an article entitled Ask.com: Today’s Google Free Alternative at Search Engine Land today I found more concrete evidence to support the case for varying your use of search engines. The article points to evidence from an interesting research study seeming to suggest that when you do the same search across most of the major search engines, they return radically different results. The study was conducted by InfoSpace the owners of Dogpile.com in collaboration with researchers from Queensland University of Technology and the Pennsylvania State University. Search Engine Land also provides a good summary of the results of this study here. If you want to read the complete study you can find it at the following Infospace web page. Or you can access the pdf of the report directly using this link Different Engines, Different Results: Web Searchers Not Always Finding What They’re Looking for Online [.pdf]. It’s definitely interesting to see some empirical evidence on the subject matter and I thought more people should be made aware of it.
Here are a few other noteworthy links on search I found on eBizMBA today that I thought shouldn’t be overlooked and others might find useful:
The Future of Search: The head of Google Research talks about his group’s projects.
Google Places Ad In Search Results
Also, here is a Mashable post I found discussing a new social networking/bookmarking (cross network search) tool that just launched called Streakr that some of you may want to check out.
