How Do Search Engines Compare

Dogpile published a paper that concluded that searchers did not always find what they are looking for.

Key findings in the report claim:

You cannot assume that all top four search engines source the same content based on a single search phrase. The total results unique to or shared by:

• One search engine - 88.3%.
• Two search engines - 8.9%.
• Three search engines - 2.2%.
• Four search engines - 0.6%.

Search phrases with more than one word have a far greater chance of finding the required content. The amount of best first page search results excluded by searching each search engine:

• Google excludes 72.7%
• Yahoo! excludes 69.2%
• Live excludes 69.9%
• Ask excludes 73.0%

This indicates that the majority of all first results page results across top search engines are unique. On average, first page search result pages unique to:

Search result ranking differs significantly across major search engines for both sponsored and non-sponsored searches. Agreement of search results across engines for:

• #1 ranked non-sponsored search - 3.6%
• top non-sponsored search - 0%
• top three non-sponsored search results - 61.4%
• top five non-sponsored search results - 74.9%

This indicates there is little overlap of sponsored links between Yahoo! and Google. The overlap for:

• Given query - 4.6%
• All queries - 22.8 %
• Queries where Google returned one or more, and Yahoo none - 9.9%

Just to add more confusion to your SEO and SEM campaigns!!

Next: Understanding Sitemaps for SEO

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