Dogpile: Search Engines Don't Have Much in Common

August 2, 2005
Dogpile: Search Engines Don't Have Much in Common
By Susan Kuchinskas

Dogpile.com, owned by Infospace.com, announced it added results from MSN Search to its meta-search service.Users now can select from links to search results from the top four search players: Google (Quote, Chart), Yahoo (Quote, Chart), Ask Jeeves (Quote, Chart) and Microsoft's (Quote, Chart) MSN.

It backed up the announcement with the results of a study by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania State University showing a surprising lack of duplication in the top results of the major search engines.

When the researchers ran 12,570 different queries through search engines at Yahoo, Google, MSN and Ask Jeeves, they found that only 1.1 percent of the results appeared on all four engines, while 84.9 percent of the top results were unique to one engine. Only 2.6 percent of the results were shared by three search providers, and 11.4 percent were delivered by two search engines.

The researchers examined both paid and natural search results, but they tabulated only the results on the first page."The top four search engines are very viable sources of information," said Brian Bowman, Infospace vice president of marketing and product management. "But they're vastly different on page one. And most people never go beyond page one."