Search Engine Quality Test Results

Using our documented testing methodology, we once again tested the five most popular search engines to scientifically determine which search engine produced the best results for searchers.

The Randomly Selected Search Terms

We chose one search term from each of our pre-defined categories. These search terms selected for this round were:

Category	Search
A band or a musician	Clint Black
A famous athlete	Lance Armstrong
A historical figure	Barry Goldwater
A movie	Batman Begins
A place	Poland
A politician	Rudy Giuliani
A pretty girl	Kathy Ireland
An entertainer	Bruce Willis
Something to buy	Stewart Screenwall

The Results - Which Search Engine Does Return the Best Results?

The results of our tests show Yahoo and MSN tied for the lead in returning the best search results. Altavista followed in a close third place, with Google and AllTheWeb tied for last place.

Once again, our test results show the five leading search engines being very close in terms of the quality of their search results.

Google's topple from first to last place most likely reflects technical difficulties implementing algorithms from the academic environment in the real world of today's Internet.

The Raw Data

Category	Search	G	Y	M	AV	ATW
A band or a musician	Clint Black	10	9.5	9.5	9.5	9.5
A famous athlete	Lance Armstrong	9	10	10	9	10
A historical figure	Barry Goldwater	9	9	9.5	9.5	9
A movie	Batman Begins	10	10	10	10	10
A place	Poland	9	8	9.5	9.5	8.5
A politician	Rudy Giuliani	6.5	8	6	8.5	6.5
A pretty girl	Kathy Ireland	10	8.5	8.5	8	8.5
An entertainer	Bruce Willis	9.5	9.5	9	9.5	9
Something to buy	Stewart Screenwall	8	10	10	9	10
Average:		9	9.17	9.11	9.17	9

The FAQs