Welcome to Gaia! :: View User's Journal | Gaia Journals

Google is regarded as the best because of its "Don't Be Evil" mantra, dominance over the Internet, and its ever-changing and smart, patented or not, algorithms. Larry Page and Sergey Brin are not only the inventors of Google but this duo is the real driving force behind the company. They envisioned giving people what they really wanted and they truly achieved their mission, or dream, as some say. They are the ones who changed the way people look for information online. Google literally took the Internet to the dry cleaners by eliminating unrelated results and duplicates. Prior to it, if a person wanted to get some information, the results that one mostly got were illegal stuff and adult media. Google had such an impact on the Internet community that it has become a verb in English language. It is one such company that still has a long way to go, and with its current form and approach, it seems like it will.

Yahoo has been one of the Internet's oldest power houses. David Filo and Jerry Yang founded the firm to keep track of their personal interests on the Internet. Slowly it began to grow in terms of information as well as visitors. Very soon, it became a rich web directory with ample source of content as well as returning visitors. It became popular with its wide array of services including the popular ones like free email and chat. Initially, it used Google's technology for providing search results to its visitors, but later on developed its own. They acquired a number of technologies from major players like Inktomi, AltaVista, Overture, etc.

MSN's Live Search by Microsoft, formerly called ' MSN Search', was one such website that no one seemed to know much about. Its own community particularly used it. It was based on Inktomi technology for a long time, until Yahoo acquired the latter. Microsoft never seemed to care about Google's gaining dominance, and has always been itching to beat it down.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Py5IGnL82_c

Results Fetching Speed

[These tests are done on 512 Kbps shared (56.6 Kbps Core).]

Keyword used: Silicon Valley

Google - 0.13 seconds to fetch 53,200,000 pages
Yahoo - 0.17 seconds to fetch 35,300,000 pages
MSN Live - 0.13 seconds to fetch 6,061,755 pages
Keyword used: WorldGoogle - 0.22 seconds to fetch 1,180,000,000 pages
Yahoo - 0.26 seconds to fetch 3,540,000,000 pages
MSN Live - 0.35 seconds to fetch 487,988,046 pages
The Fastest is, undoubtedly, Google. Speed, along with the result count, was used to ascertain the result.

Daily Searches Done

(Source: Nielsen Net Ratings for July 2006)

Google - 49.2%
Yahoo - 23.8% (exclude searches done at AltaVista, AlltheWeb, and Overture)
MSN Live - 9.6%
Others - 17.4%
Therefore, the Highest Used one, apparently is Google.



U.S Reach

(Source: quantcast)

Google - 118,682,840 | Rank: 2
Yahoo - 52,514,136 | Rank: 6
MSN Live - 46,213,680 | Rank: 7
The Highest Reached is, the obvious one, Google.

Features

Google

Limited Boolean searching.
Field keys: intitle:, inurl:, allintitle:, link:, allinurl:, site:, allinanchor:, related:, numrange:, pricerange:, flink:, etc.
Has a built-in calculator.
YahooBetter Boolean searching than Google: AND, OR, NOT,( ), -.
Field keys: intitle:, site: or domain:, hostname:, link:, linkdomain:, url:, inurl:, originurlextension:, feature:acrobat, feature:applet, feature:activex, feature:audio, feature:flash, feature:form, feature:frame, feature:homepage, feature:image, feature:index, feature:javascript, feature:meta, feature:script, feature:shockwave, feature:table, feature:video, feature:vrml.
Also has a built-in calculator.
MSN LiveOffers full Boolean searching.
Field keys: site:, filetype:, intitle:, inbody:, inanchor:, inurl:, language:, loc:, link:, linkdomain:, linkfromdomain:, contains:,ip:, prefer:, feed:, hasfeed:, url:, etc.
Has a built-in calculator, though it is very meager and proves to be insufficient, most of the time.
The one with Better features, surprisingly, was Yahoo.

Index Size

On August 8th 2005, Yahoo announced they have 20 billion-page index, which was higher than Google at that time. Many people suggested that Yahoo's results had many duplicates. Index size of all these 3 is so huge and there are so many anomalies that there is no point considering it as a parameter whilst comparing.

Algorithm, Technology and Quality Coding



As these 3 companies will never give away their source codes for study, we will never know who has better technology than its counterpart. I was going through SERPs of these websites and found a very funny thing. I visited Google and typed the words search engines, and clicked the result that showed Dogpile's cached version. Here's a screenshot:

Cached version of Dogpile