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	Sara Evans
A famous athlete	John Elway
A historical figure	Thomas Paine
A movie	America: Freedom to Fascism
A place	Disneyland
A politician	Condoleezza Rica
A pretty girl	Rachel Hunter
An entertainer	John Malkovich
Something to buy	External Hard Drive

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

Yahoo appears to be pulling away with a serious lead in terms of search engine quality. Much more than is represented in the quantitative data, the quality of the Yahoo search results were noticeably better than their competitors.

Google continues to suffer from their practice of deploying algorithm updates with insufficient testing.

The poor performance of MSN in this round of testing was largely due to their inability to effectively filter duplicate content.

The Raw Data

Category	Search	G	Y	M
A band or a musician	Sara Evans	10	9	9
A famous athlete	John Elway	8.5	10	9
A historical figure	Thomas Paine	9.5	10	9
A movie	America: Freedom to Fascism	7	10	8
A place	Disneyland	6.5	9	6
A politician	Condoleeza Rice	8	8	9
A pretty girl	Rachel Hunter	9	9	7.5
An entertainer	John Malkovich	7.5	7	5
Something to buy	External Hard Drive	9	9.5	9
Average:		7.5	8.15	7.15

The FAQs