Search Engine Comparison

Introduction
In the last twenty years, the number of web pages available via the World Wide Web has grown exponentially. The amount of information present accessible by anyone with an Internet connection is staggering. Just like anything, however, too much information has its drawbacks. One of the biggest of these is how to sort through it all to find what you want? The answer to this is typically found in public search engines. These sites offer the web surfer a place to start. Usually this only involves entering a word, sentence or phrase into an input box and clicking the "find" button. However, along with the solution comes yet another problem. There are so many of these public web search engines that it is difficult to decide which is the most effective to use. This analysis will include three of the most popular web engines, "Yahoo!", "Google" and "Ask Jeeves", and will analyze them according to search method, interface and search success.

Intended audience for the resource
The search engines are targeted for internet users in general.

Intended audience for this review
This document is intended to inform internet users who may not be aware of the many different search engines available to them.

Yahoo!
Yahoo!, rolled out in 1994, is one of the oldest search engines. It is unique among web search engines, because it's database is primarily indexed by actual human beings. This method of indexing helps to create a system that is both logical and easily understandable to the user of the engine. Also, Yahoo!'s main page (http://www.yahoo.com), is well setup so that you can access several places of interest, including News and E-cards sections without even scrolling down. In my opinion, Yahoo! does an exceptional job in providing a single page that a user can use to get to a variety of interesting places. To test it's search accuracy, I used two questions, one general, "Christmas Carols" and one specific "Music for Carol of the Bells". The intent of both is to find words and/or music for Christmas Carols. Yahoo! found 59700 matches for "Christmas Carol" and, of the first ten websites returned, 9 provided words or music for Christmas Carols. Yahoo! returned 19000 web pages for the specific question and 5 of the top ten were relevant. Overall, Yahoo is very well put together and useful for finding both general and specific information.

Google
Google is currently the largest web search engine because of its unique link analysis system of indexing. Essentially, Google ranks pages according to the number of other web pages that link to it. This system allows a quasi-user ranked list of results. Google's appearance is simplistic and its main page (http://www.google.com) only provides a minimum of links, mostly pertaining to the Google Company or to searching. However, it's minimalist appearance also feels less cluttered than Yahoo!'s. Google returned 114,000 web pages for the general question and nine of the top ten were relevant. 39,900 web pages were returned for the specific question and 7 of the top ten were relevant. Overall, Google's appearance is a little sparser than Yahoo!'s, but feels less cluttered and its search function seems marginally more effective (although both returned many of the same top ten pages).

Ask Jeeves
Ask Jeeves is a search engine self-proclaimed to "humanize" web searching. Ask Jeeves uses a combination of software and human editors to rank web pages by their popularity with website users. Its indexing goal is to provide "useful and relevant information". Its appearance is similarly minimalist to Google. It's main page only provides the search input bar and a few links to features and sponsor's ads. For the general search, Ask Jeeves provided a useful tool that allows you to ask a more specific question (i.e. What are the words and music to /you select the carol). This tool seems very useful in addition to 7 of the ten top web page matches being relevant. For the specific question, Ask Jeeves found 8 of 10 relevant web pages. Overall, Ask Jeeves seems to have a very effective indexing method.

Conclusion
I was a bit surprised when doing this report to see that Ask Jeeves had such a high relevancy rate. Google has long been my search engine of choice and I've often used Yahoo! as my second choice. However, it seems from this analysis that Ask Jeeves is far more effective when it comes to specific questions than either Google or Yahoo!. On general questions, all three engines seem about the same, so I would probably continue to use Google or Yahoo! for general searches, however, when it comes to specific searches, I think I will start using Ask Jeeves instead.

Highlights



If you have any questions, please email Kyle Bartley.
Created for INLS 80-1, Feb. 13th, 2002.