Search Results Go To The Dogs

An article on Metasearch has some interesting stats on the differences between page one results on the top search engines.

...a study conducted by Dogpile in collaboration with researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania State University, "Missing Pieces: A Study of First Page Web Search Engine Results Overlap." compiled a random sampling of 10,316 keyword searches across Google, Yahoo!, and Ask Jeeves, returning a total of 336,232 unique search results on page one.

Only 3% of returned results (totaling 10,712 links) achieved first-page rankings across all three search engines, 12% of first-page results (39,959 links) were shared by two of the three engines, and 85% of results (285,561 links) appeared on just one of the engines' first pages.

(you can) try this yourself. Go to missingpieces.dogpile.com to test the Missing Pieces tool, and see how results overlap.

This is interesting both because it shows how hard it is to rank well across the top search engines at the same time, and it highlights the fact that none of these search engines are really very good at finding 'the best' results. They just each have their own algorithmic biases and we're all too lazy to turn to page two or (usually) to go try another search engine. I think 24 months from now the major search engines won't look anything like they do today (in terms of results or user-interfaces) and we'll look back at this first 'heyday of search' and wonder how we all got along with such terrible results.