The most popular Web search engines rarely deliver the same results when identical queries are performed on each site, and the disparity has increased over the past two years, new research has found.Majority of all first-page results across top search engines are unique: on average…In a study of 19,332 queries, Google, Yahoo, Windows Live and Ask delivered the same top result only 3.6% of the time. The four engines never delivered the same top three results, even when the order of the results was ignored. Fewer than 1% of first-page results were shared by all four sites.
The search engines agreed more often in a study two years ago, in which the top result matched all four engines on 7% of queries.
“These differences contradict any notion that all search engines are the same and that searching one engine will yield the absolute best results of the Web,” the paper states.
Dogpile.com, a metasearch engine that combines results from the top search sites, conducted the study with researchers from Queensland University of Technology and Pennsylvania State University. The research paper claims the study highlights the value of sites that deliver results from multiple search engines.
- 69.6% of Google’s were unique to Google.
- 79.4% of Yahoo’s were unique to Yahoo.
- 80.1% of Liv’s were unique to Live.
- 75.0% Ask’s were unique to Ask.